Crossing the Channel, and surveying the limited expanse of our own "beloved England," we become aware of certain districts which belong to the Desert World. Through the ceaseless energy of our race, and the introduction of mechanical inventions which economize time and labour and treble the reproductive power of capital, almost all England has been transformed into a rich and radiant garden, where the waste places are "few and far between," where the solitude of desolation is scarcely known; yet, as already observed, there are districts which retain much of their ancient wildness of character. Such a region is Dartmoor, the extensive and romantic table-land of granite which occupies the south-western part of the county of Devon. In its recesses still linger the eagle, the bustard, and the crane; its solitudes are broken by the hoarse cries of the sparrow-hawk, the hobby, and the goshawk; and the Cyclopean memorials of Druidism which cover its surface--cromlechs and kistvaens, tolmêns and stone-avenues--invest it with a peculiar air of mysterious awe. It extends in length about twenty-two miles (from north to south), and in breadth twenty miles (from east to west). Its total area exceeds 130,000 acres. It rises above the surrounding country like "the long, rolling waves of a tempestuous ocean, fixed into solidity by some instantaneous and powerful impulse." A natural rampart is cast around it. Deep ravines, watered by murmuring streams, diversify its aspect, and lofty hills of granite, locally called _tors_, of which the principal, Yes Tor, has an elevation of 2050 feet above the sea. Its soil is composed of peat, in some places twenty-five feet deep; underneath which lies a solid mass of granite, occasionally relieved by trap (a volcanic rock), and traversed by veins of tin, copper, and manganese.[14] Nearly in the centre of this dismal wilderness lies an immense morass, whose surface is in many places incapable of supporting the lightest animal, and whose inexhaustible reservoirs supply the fountains of many a river and stream--the Dart, the Teign, the Taw, the Tavy--all clear as crystal in the summer months, but after heavy rains running redly through the "stony vales." The roaring of these torrents, when angry and swollen, is sublime to a degree inconceivable by those who have never heard the wild impressive music of untamed Nature.