Antiquity and long-continued vitality such as have fallen to Winchester--for to go back to its early humble beginnings takes us back very far indeed--lead us naturally to look for causes, and prompt the questions, Why, in the first instance, did a human community settle here at all? What through so many alternations of human vicissitude and political circumstance has operated to maintain these intact? _Tempus edax rerum_--Time, the devourer of constituted things, is written not so much on its stones, as in its stones, yet Winchester remains Winchester still. For, be it noted, there is nothing in the nature of things which gives to cities and communities any prescriptive claim or assurance of permanence. We have not, indeed, to travel far from Winchester to find instructive instances, to the very contrary, among its earliest neighbours and contemporaries. Silchester, Sarum, Portchester, its early British contemporaries, which once flourished even as Winchester, have long since sunk, the last named into inanition, the two former into dissolution so complete that no trace now remains, save what little the ploughshare or the antiquary may from time to time unearth; and that little would probably, but for the worms’ unceasing activity, have long since perished beyond recall. For with cities, as with the animal world, the secret of continued vigour is the secret of continued adaptation to environment; towns and cities, like other organized existences, are just as old as the arteries which feed them, and as long as function is efficiently performed, so long will there be health to perform it. And yet as years go, Winchester is old,--how old none can say. Ancient Neolithic interments on St. Giles’s Hill, old Celtic barrows on Morne (_Magdalen_) Hill behind, carry us back far indeed beyond the days of permanent settlement, and her continuous existence goes back far beyond the days of any written historical record, yet all these years she has retained her identity and her vigour unimpaired. What physical causes have contributed to this we shall perhaps be better able to appreciate if we quit St. Giles’s Hill and clamber up to the top of St. Catherine’s Hill, the bold chalk hill which dominates the view southward from the city. An interesting hill it is, with modern associations which we will not stop to consider now, but turn our thoughts to the view before us. Below us is a flat-bottomed valley, a mile or two across, with the numerous winding channels of the river intersecting the water meadows at our feet. To our north lies the city, seen from this point to excellent advantage, occupying the flat of the valley, and creeping up the hill slopes on either side, while far away in the distance the chalk upland seems to roll away, ridge succeeding ridge, till all detail is lost in distance.