Part 13

LONDON'S BURIED ELEPHANTS

The amount of river gravel left in the part of the Thames Valley on which West London is built is extraordinary. It is all round, and mostly red, and as there are no rocks like the stone which makes up most of this gravel anywhere in the modern valley, it is puzzling to know where it came from. I went to see the digging of the foundations of the new South Kensington Museum, and the great excavation, which was like the ditch of a fortress, and the stuff thrown out, which was like the rampart, was all dug in, or made of, river gravel. In this the men had found, lying higgledy-piggledy, with no two bones "belonging," quantities of bones of the beasts which used to graze on what I suppose was the Kensington "veldt," or perhaps flats by the riverside, during the time when the river's drift and brick earth was being deposited. The Clerk of the Works was much interested in these discoveries, and had caused them to be carefully collected. These were bones of the great stags then common, of the elephant, and of the primaeval horse, creatures which lived here before the Channel was cut between England and France, though not, perhaps, before man had appeared in what is now the Thames Valley, for flint implements are often found with the bones. Dr. Woodward, to whom some of the remains were taken, said that they reminded him of the great discovery of similar remains in the brick earth at Ilford, in Essex, thirty-seven years ago, when he personally saw, dug from the brickfields of that almost suburban parish, the head and tusks of one of the largest mammoth elephants in the world. These river-gravel and brick-earth buried bones are rather earlier than those found in the peat and marl. The latter belonged to creatures which, though they no longer exist in England, are still found in temperate Europe--beavers, bears, bison, and wolves. But the Thames gravel and the London clay are in places full of the bones of another, and earlier, though by no means primaeval, generation of mammals, some of which are extinct, while others are found at great distances from this country, in remote parts of the earth. Judging from the places where they are found and from the position of the bones, large animals must have swarmed all over what is now London, just as they do on the Athi plains and near the rivers and forests through which the Uganda Railway runs.

There was the same astonishing mixture of species, a mixture which puzzles inquirers rather more than it need. Hippopotamus bones are found in great numbers, and with the hippopotamus remains those of creatures like the reindeer and the musk ox, now found only on the Arctic fringe and frozen rim of the North, which lived on the same area and with them the Arctic fox. Judging from the great range of climate which most northern animals can endure, there is no reason to think this juxtaposition of a creature only found in warm rivers and of what are now Arctic animals is very strange. The London "hippo" was just the same, to judge from his bones, as that of the Nile or Congo. But the reindeer of North America, under the name of the woodland cariboo, comes down far south, and in the Arctic summer that of Europe endures a very high temperature. The Arctic fox does the same. If there were Arctic animals in Kensington and Westminster, that is no evidence that they lived in an Arctic climate. Looking over the list of bones, skulls, teeth, and tusks found, it is interesting to try to reconstruct mentally the fauna of greater London just previous to the coming of man. There were, to begin with, some African animals, either the same as are found on the Central African plains, and were found on the veldt of South Africa, or of the same families. The present condition of the country between Mount Kilimanjaro and the Victoria Nyanza shows quite as great a mixture of species. There, for instance, are all the big antelopes, rhinoceroses, zebras, lions, elephants, hyaenas, and wild dogs, and though there are glaciers on Kilimanjaro and the great mountains near the central valleys, the river running out of the Great Rift Valley is full of crocodiles and hippopotami. There is heather and, higher up, also ice and snow on the mountains, from whose tops the waters come that feed these crocodile-haunted streams. So on the London "veldt" there were lions, wild horses (perhaps striped like zebras), three kinds of rhinoceroses--two of which were just like the common black rhinoceros of Africa, though one had a woolly coat--elephants, hyaenas, hippopotami, and that most typical African animal the Cape wild dog! All these, except the elephants and hippos, can stand some degree of cold; and there is not the slightest reason why the two last may not have flourished in some deep river valley, very many degrees hotter than the hills above. To take an instance still remaining nearer to Europe than the Great Rift Valley. The Jordan Valley is very deep and very hot. Many species of birds are there found which are resident in India, and not anywhere nearer. It is a kind of hot slice of India embedded in the Palestine hills. The very large deer and immense bison and wild oxen probably fed on the same low veldt as the African animals. The bison were the same as those found in Lithuania, but far larger. Numbers of the skulls, of quite gigantic size, have been found in the brick earth. In the British Museum there is a tooth of the mammoth found in 1731, at a depth of 28 feet below the surface, in digging a sewer in Pall Mall. This Pall Mall mammoth might well figure in Mr. E. T. Reed's prehistoric series in Punch. Another tooth was found in Gray's Inn Lane. The mammoth was evidently not confined to the present region of clubland.

Besides these European and African groups of animals, a third class ranged the London plains, probably at a greater height and in a still colder temperature than the large grass-eating mammals mentioned. These creatures, whose bones are found plentifully in the drift, are now living in a country even more specialised than the African veldt. They are the creatures of the Tartar steppes and the cold plains of Central Asia. Their names are the suslik (a Central Asian prairie dog), the pika, a little steppe hare, and an extremely odd antelope, now found in Thibet. This is a singularly ugly beast with a high Roman nose, and wool almost as thick as that of a sheep when the winter coat is on. It must have been quite common in those parts, for I have had the cores of two of their horns brought to me during the last few years.

These dry bones are not made so astonishingly interesting by their setting in the gravel as are some far more ancient remains in England. The gravel is a mere rubbish-bed, like a sea-beach, in which all things have lost their connection. I was recently shown a set of fossils far more ancient, possibly not less than 2,000,000 years old, which were all found and may be seen exactly as they lay and lived when they were on the bottom of a prehistoric river which flowed through Hampshire, across what is now the Channel, over South France, and then fell into the Mediterranean. This river crosses the Channel at Hordwell cliffs on the Solent. There is the whole section, of a great stream two miles wide, with the gravel at its edges, the sediment and sand a little lower down the sides, and the mud at the bottom. On each lie its appropriate shells. Some are like those in the Thames to-day, but many more like those of a river in Borneo. They are so thick that out of a single ounce of the mud 150 little shells were obtained. In this, too, were found the tooth of a crocodile and the bones of a spiny pike, and in other masses of clay the very reeds and bits of the trees that grew there. These sedges of the primitive ages were quite charming. Even some of their colour was preserved, and all their delicate fluting and fibre, in the fine clay. One of the branches of a tree, now turned to lignite, had possessed a thick pith. This pith had decayed, and water had trickled down the hollow like a pipe. The water was full of iron pyrites, and had first lined the tube with iron crystals and then filled up the whole hollow with a frosted network of the same. There is a striking contrast between the presence and realism of these once living things still preserving the outer forms of life and the vast and inconceivable distances of "geological time."

SWANS, BLACK AND WHITE

A few pairs of black swans have been placed upon the river. Some of these rear broods of young ones, and appear to be quite acclimatised. The black swan was known to the traders of our own East India Company nearly a century before Captain Cook and Sir Joseph Banks discovered Botany Bay. The first notice of it appears in a letter, written about the year 1698, by a Mr. Watson to Dr. M. Lister, in which he says, "Here is returned a ship which by our East India Company was sent to the South Land, called Hollandia Nova," and adds that black swans, parrots, and many sea-cows were found there. In 1726, two were brought alive to Batavia, which were caught on the West Coast of Australia, near Hartop Bay, but no good account of their habits was ever written till Gould put together the facts he had seen and learnt on the spot.

The habits in their native land of birds which we only see acclimatised and domesticated, sometimes give a clue to what can be done to domesticate other breeds. This swan is only found in Australia, and only locally there, in the south and west. There it takes the place occupied by the Brent goose in our northern latitude, both as a water bird and as a source of food to the natives. "Wherever there are rivers, estuaries of the sea, lagoons, and pools of water of any extent the bird is generally distributed," says Gould. "Sometimes it occurs in such numbers that flocks of many hundreds can be seen together, particularly on those arms of the sea which, after passing the beachline of the coast, expand into great sheets of shallow water, on which the birds are seldom disturbed either by the force of boisterous winds or the intrusion of the natives. In the white man, however, the black swan finds an enemy so deadly, that in many parts where it was formerly quite numerous it has been almost, if not entirely, extirpated.

"This has been particularly the case on some of the larger rivers of Tasmania, but on the salt lagoons and inlets of D'Entrecasteaux's channel, the little-frequented bays of the southern and western shores of that island and the entrance to Melbourne Harbour at Port Phillip, it is still numerous." This was written in 1865, when to voyagers to the new continent the black swans of Melbourne Harbour were sometimes a first and striking reminder that they had reached a new world. One of the most deadly means of killing off the black swans was to chase them in boats, and either to net or club them, when they had shed all their flight feathers. This is what Mr. Trevor Battye saw the Samoyeds doing to the Brent geese on Kolguev Island. Thousands were driven into a kind of kraal, and killed for winter food. Next to the pelagic sealer, the whalers and ordinary seal-hunters are the worst scourges of the animal world. They killed off, for instance, every single one of the Antarctic right whales, and nearly all the Cape and Antarctic fur seals. But it is not generally known that they succeeded in almost killing off the black swans in some districts. They caught and killed them in boatloads, not for the flesh, but to take the swans' down. Black swans have white wings, though as they are nearly always pinioned here, a stupid habit which our people have learnt from the ancient and time-honoured brutality of "swan upping," we never see them flying. They are then very beautiful objects, with their plumage of ebon and ivory.

In Australia they begin to lay in October, and the young are hatched and growing in January. They are very prolific birds, laying from five to eight light-green eggs with brownish buff markings. Some years ago a splendid brood of six jolly little nigger cygnets were hatched out by the black swans at Kew. But the most successful breeder of black swans in this country was Mr. Samuel Gurney, who began his stock with a pair on the river Wandle, at Carshalton. He bought them in Leadenhall Market, in 1851. They did not breed till three years later, and laid their first egg on January 1st.

This is very interesting, because it shows that so far these birds were not acclimatised, but kept more or less to the seasons of reproduction proper to their native land. They were laying in what is the Australian summer and our mid-winter. It was a most severe winter, and the young ones were hatched out in a severe frost, which had lasted all the time that the birds were sitting in the open. The cygnets lived--it is not stated how many there were--and later on, the parents continued to breed, till in 1862, eight years after, they had hatched ninety-three young ones, and reared about half the number. The most extraordinary thing about the original pair was that they seem to have taken on both our seasons and their own, laying both in our spring and in the Australian spring, and so hatching two broods a year. They bred sixteen times in seven years--or probably seven and a half--and in that time laid one hundred and eleven eggs. The interest of this story is very considerable, because it shows the imperfect and exhausting efforts which Nature causes animals to make to adapt their breeding time to a new climate. Black swans which are descended from young birds bred in this country conform to the ordinary nesting-time of our hemisphere.

I notice that among the white swans on the Thames the cock-bird will fight to preserve his lady from intrusion, but he never thinks of taking her any breakfast, or of bringing her food of any kind, even though he may be fed most liberally himself. His only idea of helping her actively is by minding house while she goes off to feed and also while she is making her toilet. Not long ago, a swan who had a nest by the Thames so far forgot his mate as to fall in love with a young lady, whom he constantly tried to persuade to come and join him on the river. She was in the habit of feeding both swans every day, but as the lady swan was on the nest for the greater part of the time, the cock swan came in for most of the attention. In time he became tame enough to feed from her hand, and would come out on to the bank; but he preferred to sit on the water and to be fed from a boat-raft. After being fed he wanted to see more of his friend, but could not understand why she preferred stopping on such an uncomfortable place as the land when all she need do to enjoy his society, and to be happier herself, was to step down into the water. He would swim away slowly, looking over his shoulder to see if she was coming. As she usually wore a white dress, there is very little doubt that the swan thought she only wanted a few feathers to be quite a presentable swan, and suited for life on the river. When he found that she did not follow, he would return, and stretching out his neck would take hold of her dress and pull her towards the water, not in anger, but with a kind and pressing insistence, as showing her what was best. This he did usually when he had finished the food she brought, and when she left the bank would swim up and down, waiting to see if she were coming back.

The time-honoured brutality of swan-upping is now mitigated by law, its cruelty being obvious. It would be far better to leave them the use of their wings, which would enable them to seek food at a distance in winter, and to escape the ice, which sometimes breaks their legs. Several of these flightless swans were starved to death in 1902.

CANVEY ISLAND

Down near Thames mouth is the curious reclamation from the river mud known as Canvey Island. It is separated from the land by a "fleet," in which the Danes are recorded to have laid up their ships in the early period of their invasions, and the village opposite on the mainland is called Benfleet. Though on the river, it is a half-marine place, with the typical sea-plants growing on the saltings by the shore. In summer I noticed that the graves below the grey sea-eaten, storm-furrowed walls of the church have wreaths of sea-lavender laid upon them. But there is not the same rich carpet of sea-flowers as at Wells or Blakeney. Nor is the deposit so rich, so soft, so ready to be covered with smiling meadows as those of North Norfolk, built up from the mud-clouds of the Fen. Canvey Island itself is a heavy, indurated soil in parts, now well established, and producing fine crops. But is it the kind of ground which would pay a fair return on the cost of "inning it" to-day? The wheat is good, the straw long, and the ears full. The oats are less good, perhaps because the soil is too heavy. The beans are strong and healthy; clover, which does not mind a salty soil, thrives there; and there are strong crops of mangold. But it is not like the Fenland; it cracks under the sun, "pans" upon the surface, and is not adapted for inexpensive or for intensive cultivation. Such was the writer's impression from a careful view of the farms in the middle of harvest. But as a fact in the history of English agriculture, and in its relation to the past story of the Thames mouth, and its possibilities as a future health resort, this work of the enterprising Dutchmen in the beginning of the seventeenth century is full of interest. In 1622 Sir Henry Appleton, the owner of the marsh, agreed to give one-third of it to Joas Croppenburg, a Dutchman skilled in the making of dikes, if he "inned" the marsh. This the Dutchman did off hand, and enclosed six thousand acres by a wall twenty miles round. Like many parts of the Fens, the island was peopled for a time by Dutchmen engaged on the works, and Croppenburg is said to have built there a church. Two small Dutch cottages remain, built in 1621. The general aspect of the island is like that part of Holland near the mouth of the "old" Rhine, but less closely cultivated and cared for.

It has always been a separate region. Never yet has it entered the heads of its proprietors to join it permanently to the mainland. For three centuries its visitors and people have driven or walked over a tide-washed causeway at low water, or ferried over at high tide. You do so still, in a scrubbed and salty boat, while an ancient road-mender is occupied in the oddest of all forms of road maintenance. He stirs and swirls the mud as the tide goes down, to wash it out of the hollow way, otherwise it would be turned into warp-land every day, and become impassable. The Dutchmen's roads are sound and straight enough on the island. Outside the wall the samphire and orach beds are wholly marine. Inside the dikes and ditches are filled with a purely sweet-water vegetation. Further seawards, or rather riverwards, at a place called "Sluis," they are fringed with wild rose and wild plum, and the ditches are deep in rushes, in willow herb, in purple nightshade, water-mint, and reeds.

Camden gives a curious account of the island in his day. It was constantly almost submerged. The people lived by keeping sheep on it. There were four thousand of a very excellent flavour. Evidently this was the origin of pre-sale mutton in England. Camden saw them milking their sheep, from which they made ewe-milk cheeses. When the floods rose the sheep used to be driven on to low mounds which studded the central parts of the marsh, and these mounds are there still. Some are covered with wild-plum bushes. One, in the centre of the island, is the site of the village of Canvey; and on one, at the time of the writer's last visit, two fine old Essex rams were sleeping in the sun. There was no flood; the island had not known even a partial one for some years. But true to the instincts of their race, they had occupied the highest ground, though it was only a few feet above the levels. There are few land-birds on Canvey Island, because there are few trees. Some greenfinches, a whinchat or two, almost no pipits or larks, and very few sparrows. The shore-birds are numerous and increasing, for the Essex County Council strictly protect all the eggs and birds during the breeding season. Enormous areas of breeding ground are now protected in the wide fringe of private fresh-water marshes of this river-intersected shore. Plovers, redshanks, terns, ducks, especially the wild mallards, are increasing. So are the black-headed gulls; even the oyster-catchers are returning. After nesting the birds lead their young to the southern point of Canvey Island. It is too near the growing and popular Southend for the birds to be other than shy. But as they are not allowed to be shot till the middle of August, they are able to take care of themselves. At the flow of the tide, before the shooting begins, the visitor who makes his way to this distant and unpeopled promontory sees the birds in thousands. Out at sea the ducks were this year as numerous as in the old days before breechloaders and railways. Stints and ringed plover, golden plover and redshanks were flitting everywhere from island to island on the mud and ooze; curlews were floating and flapping over the "fleets"; and all were in security. As the tide flowed, they crowded on to the highest and last-covered islets, whence, as the inexorable tide again rose, they took wing and flew swiftly to the Essex shore. The Sluis, looking across to the Kentish shore, is the home of the seagulls. Many quaint ships lie anchored there--Dutch eel-boats, which call for refreshment after selling the cargo; barges; hoys from the Medway bound to Harwich; and fishing-smacks and timber-brigs. Round these the seagulls float, as tame almost as London pigeons. They prefer company, at least the lesser gulls do; the big herring gulls and black-backed gulls keep aloof.

The hope of reclaiming land from the waves exercises a peculiar fascination over most minds. It presents itself in more than one form as a most desirable activity. It is something like creation--a form of making earth from sea. The clothing of the fringe of ocean's bed with herbage, the reaping of a harvest where rolled the tide, the barring out of the dominant sea, the vision, not altogether illusive, of planting industrious and deserving men on the ground so won, all these are alluring ideas. The undertaker, to use the word in vogue in the Stuart days when such enterprises were in high favour, always leaves a name among posterity, generally an honoured name, and in nearly every case one associated with courage, perseverance, and in some measure with benevolence. The picturesque and sentimental side will always remain to the credit of the reclaimers of the waste of Neptune's manor. But if the balance of profitable expenditure, or of good done to others, is weighed between winning land from the sea and expenditure in improving the cultivation of land already accessible, the award should probably be given to the latter. Intensive cultivation and the improvement of the millions of acres which we now possess is a more thankworthy task, demands more brains, and should give greater results than the gaining of a few thousands of acres now covered by water. This conclusion is not the one which any lover of enterprise or of picturesque endeavour would prefer. It is a pity that it is so. Perhaps in days to come when wheat is once more precious the sea wastes may once more be worth recovery. But even so they are not desirable spots on which to plant a population. They are by natural causes on the way to nowhere, and out of communication with the towns and villages. Brading Harbour, in the Isle of Wight, is an exception, for it ran up inland. Lord Leicester's marshes at Holkham are narrow though long, and, while splendidly fertile, are all well within reach of the farms and villages. But to scatter farms and labourers' cottages on the dreary flats of a place like Canvey Island is not likely to appeal to the wishes of modern agriculturists, who feel the dulness of rural life acutely already. The growth of the Jewish colonies not far off on the mainland, where poor Hebrews continually reinforce a community devoted to field and garden labour and content to begin by earning the barest living, seems to indicate that a population from the poorest urban class might be found for reclaimed land. But the industrious town artisans of English blood have not yet found life so intolerable as to be ready to try the experiment.

THE LONDON THAMES AS A WATERWAY

Mary Boyle, in "Her Book," speaking of the time when her father had an appointment at the Navy Board and a residence in Somerset House, says, "It was our great delight to go by water on Sunday afternoon to Westminster Abbey, and there is no doubt we occasionally cut a grand figure on the river; for when my father went out he had a splendid barge, rowed by boatmen clad entirely in scarlet, with black jockey caps, such as in those picturesque old days formed part of that beautiful river procession in honour of the Lord Mayor, on the 9th of November, over the disappearance of which pageant I have often mourned."

It was not until the early days of the present reign that neglect and dirt spoiled our river as an almost Royal waterway; and we believe that as late as the days of Archbishop Tait the Primate's State barge used to convey him from Lambeth Palace to the House of Lords opposite. State barges and river processions were the standing examples of State pageantry, thoroughly popular and remembered by the intensely conservative people of London; and it is a tribute to the feeling that the use of the river was a necessary part of London life, that the Lord Mayor and his suite on the 9th of November used to take boat at Blackfriars Bridge, and went thence by water to Westminster Hall, returning in their State barges to the bridge, where their coaches were waiting for them. We may credit the founders of the earliest illustrated paper with a knowledge of the popular sentiment of the day. When the Illustrated London News was established the title-page of that paper showed the Thames, with the procession of State barges in the foreground, and the then new and popular river steamers passing by them.

In addition to cleanliness something in the form of a restoration of old conditions of water-level and other improvements by modern engineering will also be required if the river is to become a popular waterway. Among the main drawbacks to its present use is the great difference in level between high and low water. The old London Bridge, with its multiplied arches and pillars, acted as a lock. It admitted the flood tide more easily than it released the ebb. The consequence was that when the tide began to fall the waters above were pent in by the bridge, and the river was kept at a level of three feet higher than it was below the obstruction. Even now at flood tide it is a splendid and imposing river. But the very improvements which add to its dignity when the tide is flowing, have caused it to remain almost waterless for a longer period during each day. The dredging and deepening of the channel forces the waterway to contract its flow, while the embanking of its sides enables the tide to slip down at great speed. For four hours in each tide the Thames is not so much a river as a half-empty conduit. It is not in the least probable that this will be allowed to continue. The success of the half-tide lock at Richmond has been beyond all expectation. It has secured a perpetual river, whether on the ebb or flow, with a mean level suited for boating and traffic at all hours. A scheme for another lock of the same kind at Wandsworth is now accepted in principle and nearly completed in detail. When this is built the long stretch of river from Wandsworth, past Putney, Ranelagh, Hammersmith, Barnes, and Kew, will retain a permanent and constant supply, augmented at the flood tide, but never falling below a certain level at the ebb. Then must follow the final and complete measure for making the London river the greatest natural amenity in the Metropolis, a half-tide lock at London Bridge, to hold up the water opposite the historic and magnificent frontage of St. Paul's, the Temple, Westminster and Lambeth, and upwards to above the embankments at Chelsea. The result would be an immense fresh-water lake, with an ebb and flow to keep it sweet and pure, but remaining for the greater part of the twenty-four hours at a fixed level, and during this period of rest only moved by a very gentle downward stream, or else practically still when the water sank level with the sills of the lock. This would make it not only easy for boats propelled by steam, sail, or oars to move on it at all hours, without hindrance from the present strong up or down currents, but also absolutely safe. Any craft, from the outrigger and Canada canoe, to the improved river steamers which would at once be launched upon its waters, could float with ease and safety on the London Thames.

The scene in the near future can be imagined from the analogy of Henley, though the larger scale of the London river makes the forecast more difficult to bring into proportion. The intentionally decorative side, given on the upper river by the houseboats, will doubtless be supplied by a new service of public or municipal passenger steamers, able to ply continuously at all hours, independently of the tide, as fast as safety permits, and absolutely punctual because the stream will be under control. These should be as brilliantly carved, gilded, coloured, and furnished as possible, surplus profits only going to the municipal coffers after the boats have been repaired yearly and thoroughly redecorated. The scheme is not in the least visionary. The Chairman of one of the tramway companies obtained recently complete estimates for a fast, luxurious, and beautiful service of Thames passenger boats, which he was convinced would pay even now; and though he did not succeed in inducing the shareholders to accept the idea of this alternative investment, there is no doubt that on the improved river the improved steamers would pay. A simultaneous and necessary addition would be the building of numerous broad, accessible, and beautiful stairs and landing places. Instead of the narrow gangway through which files of passengers slowly creep there must be long platforms, on to which the crowds on board the vessels step, as from a train, all along the length of the ships, so that the touch and departure may be rapid. The decline of traffic on the river is largely due to the narrowness and fewness of these points of access, which were gradually closed as the river was deserted for the road, while their blocking or neglect discouraged efforts to improve or multiply boats and steamers.

In 1543 there were twelve large and handsome flights of stairs down to the river between Blackfriars and Westminster. In 1600, besides these there were public and private gateways of large size, covered docks for State and private barges, and every convenience for access to the water. There were stairs and stages at Essex House, Arundel House, Somerset House, York House (the water-gate of which still remains, with a frontage of embankment and garden between it and the river of to-day), Bedford House, Durham House, Whitehall, and Westminster. The latter were "the King's Stairs." There are few constructions which lend themselves better to architectural treatment than water-gates and stairways. They would become one of the features of the Embankment. On the river itself the City Companies would once more launch their State barges, and the Houses of Parliament would have a flotilla of decorative steam or electric launches. Permanent moorings, now difficult to maintain near the bank on account of the runaway tide, would hold boats, launches, and single-handed sailing yachts. No one will grudge the County Council a State barge; while the new municipalities which border on the river--Westminster, Southwark, Fulham, Kensington, and the rest--will endeavour to interest their members in the great waterway by following the example of the Thames Conservancy and sending their representatives for official voyages to survey its banks and note suggestions for improvements in their actual setting and surroundings. No doubt in winter all the minor pleasure traffic would cease. But there is no reason whatever why a service of ornamental and well-equipped screw steamers plying at very short intervals, and with absolute punctuality, should not continue all the winter through. They would be entirely unlike the "penny boat." Double-storied deckhouses, glazed and warmed, would afford the passengers more room, purer air, and a more rapid means of transport than the omnibus, and a far more agreeable mode of crossing from one side of the river to the other than by railway bridges, tunnels, or the architecturally beautiful, but crowded, stone bridges used for ordinary traffic.

THE THAMES AS A NATIONAL TRUST

A movement is on foot among various societies interested in the preservation of outdoor England to take measures jointly for the protection of the beauties of the Thames. The subject is one which attracts more interest yearly, and the time has now come when the nation should make up its mind on the subject of such splendid properties as it possesses in "real estate" like the Thames and the New Forest, with especial regard to their value for beauty and enjoyment. It would be unfair to expect too much from the Thames Conservancy in this direction. That body exists to maintain the navigation of the river, and to see that no impediments are put in the way of its use as a waterway. Its duties are, in the first instance, those of a Highway Board, which deals with a river instead of a road. It has to buoy wrecks, and see that they are raised. It controls the speed of steamers and launches, not, in the first place, because they are a nuisance to pleasure boats, but because the "wash" destroys the banks, and this costs money to repair. It arranges for the dredging of shallows in the fairway, for the embankment of the shores, and for the repair and maintenance of the locks. Its business is to do this as cheaply as is consistent with efficiency, and to lay no unavoidable burden on the trade of the river. The preservation of its amenities is not, strictly speaking, the object for which the Conservancy exists. Yet it has done much in this direction, by obtaining from time to time powers not originally in its jurisdiction. It may be said to be on its way to become a guardian of the amenities of the river, though these, which are fast becoming far more important than its use as a means of traffic, were at first only accidentally objects of solicitude to the Conservators, and such attention as is by them devoted to this end is mainly confined to the Upper Thames, and not to the London river. Legislation to preserve natural beauty, or prevent disfigurement, has practically only been possible in recent years, and the wish to do so, though shared by most classes, is not yet so pronounced as it ought to be. What the Conservancy has been able to do, under these circumstances, has been done, partly on grounds of health, which are recognised in Legislation, and partly to preserve the fishery. It has endeavoured to keep the river from the most disgusting forms of pollution, and lately from being made the receptacle for minor but objectionable refuse. It has certainly prevented the Upper Thames being made into a sewer, and also stopped pollution by paper mills and factories. London's need of pure drinking water has given immense assistance to the forces which were working to keep our rivers clean. All the tributaries of the Thames are now under surveillance, and no village or little country town may use them to pour sewage into. Country villagers may grumble at being forced to keep water clean for Londoners to drink. But this Act has done more to preserve the amenities of the countryside than any other of this generation. It is so far-reaching, and so frankly expresses the principle of placing public rights in the "natural commodity" of pure water in our rivers before private convenience in saving expense, that it is a hopeful sign of the times. While the existence of this extensive control is a guarantee for the increasing pureness of the Upper Thames, it is also a precedent for regulating and increasing the supervision of this national property in the most beautiful, the largest, and the most pleasant highway in our country, whose very pavement is a means of delight to the eye, of pleasure to the touch, and of refreshment to all the senses. The minor regulations for its maintenance are still more encouraging, for some of these aim directly at preserving beauty, or objects of natural interest, for their own sake. The oldest are those which protect the fishery. There is one close-time for the coarse fish, another for the trout, and a limit of size to the meshes of the nets which may be used. Such minor disfigurements as the throwing of ashes from steam-launches into the water or of kitchen debris from houseboats are forbidden. Recently the Conservators have taken powers more frankly directed to the preservation of natural beauty, though even in these cases what may be called direct "taste legislation" has not been exercised. They have not asked for leave to say definitely: "This or that object is hideous or disfiguring, and cannot be allowed by the side of our national highway." But they have said, "This or that object which grows on or lives by the side of our river-road is beautiful, and gives pleasure to the public, and therefore it shall not be destroyed." The result has been that the birds on the river and its banks may no longer be shot, and certain flowers are not permitted to be plucked. The Conservancy is also able indirectly to exercise some control over riverside building operations, and very recently compelled an alteration of design in the use of a building site on a reach of the Upper Thames.

It may be asked why, if so much has already been done, we should not rest contented with the present control of the river, trusting that a gradual increase of powers will be granted to the Conservancy, so that little by little they may be able to meet all requirements for the preservation of the Thames as our national river, just as the New Forest is preserved on the grounds that it was "of unique beauty and historic interest."

The answer is that, in the first place, this is not the proper business of the Conservancy, but only an incidental duty; and, in the next, that with the best of goodwill, as is shown by what they have done, the Conservators have only been able to mitigate, not to control, a vast amount of disfigurement and abuse of the river in the past. They were not created ad hoc, and the body has not the position which would enable them to take a strong line, or powers for expenditure on purely non-remunerative business, such as might be necessary if a millowner had to be bought out if about to sell his property for conversion into a gasworks, like the factory of the Brentford Gas Company just opposite the palace at Kew, or the foul soapworks which for years disfigured the banks and polluted the air at Barnes. They have not the funds to maintain a proper police to stop the minor pollution of the river, or to scavenge it properly, and anywhere below Kew Bridge they are entirely unable to cope with bankside disfigurements. Else we cannot believe that for years the bank opposite the terrace at Barnes and the villas above it would have been given up to the shooting of dustbin refuse for hundreds of yards, or that Chiswick and Richmond would have been permitted to pour "sewage effluent" into what are still two of the finest reaches on the London river, or that we should see advertisements of "A Site on the River--Suitable for a Nuisance Trade," advertised, as was recently done, in a daily paper. If the London public, for instance, will only make up its mind in time that the Thames is something really necessary to its enjoyment of life; that it is the most beautiful natural area which they can easily reach; that on it may be had the freshest air, the best exercise, good sport (if the fishery were replenished and the water kept clean), and constant rest and refreshment for mind and body--it would no doubt succeed in inducing Parliament to put the river under a strong Commission with an adequate endowment. But the preservation of the Thames is more than a local, or even a London, question. It is a national property and of national importance, and should be managed from this point of view. Mr. Richardson Evans has made out a good case for national property in scenery generally. But here the case is stronger, because the river is a national property already, and anything which decreases its amenities for private ends damages the property. Like very much other real estate, its value depends now not on its return to the nation as a highway (above London, that is), but purely as a "pleasure estate." Supposing any private owner to be in possession of a beautiful stretch of river, is it conceivable that, if he could, he would not get a law passed to prevent gasworks, or hideous advertisements, or rowdy steamers, or stinking dust-heaps, or sewage works from spoiling any part of it? Would he let people throw in dead cats and dogs, or set up cocoa-nut shies on the banks?--all of which things have been done, and are done, between Syon House and Putney Bridge, on the way by river from London itself to London's fairest suburbs, Richmond and Twickenham. Or would he allow himself to be shut off from access to his own river, or forbidden to walk along the path by its side, supposing that one existed? Yet the public, whose rights of way on the Thames are as good as those of any private owner on his own waters, either suffer these things to go by default, or at most permit and only faintly encourage a body which was not created to care for this purpose, to undertake it because there is no other authority to do so. It is no use to leave these things to the local authority, however competent. There is always the danger that local authorities--even those representing interests normally opposed to each other--may agree to press local interests at the expense of the public. What is needed is that both the New Forest and the Thames shall be created national Trusts. Both are as valuable, as unique, and as important as the British Museum, and should be controlled by trustees of such standing and position that their decision on matters of taste and expediency in managing and maintaining the natural amenities of the national forest and the national stream would be beyond question. The decisions of the trustees of the British Museum are scarcely ever questioned by public opinion. Could not the national river be placed under similar guardianship?