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 ALLOA — AL LOTMENTS There he remained till 1870, when considerations of health induced him to resign his professorship and retire to Dorsetshire, where he devoted himself to his favourite pastime of horticulture. The scientific papers which came from his pen are very numerous. His most important work was upon the gymnoblastic hydrozoa, on which he published in 1871-72, through the Ray Society, an exhaustive monograph, based largely on his own researches and illustrated with drawings of remarkable excellence from his own hand. Biological science is also indebted to him for several convenient terms which have come into daily use, e.y., endoderm and ectoderm for the two cellular layers of the body-wall in Coelenterates. He became a Fellow of the Royal Society in 1854, and received a Royal medal in 1873. For several years he occupied the presidential chair of the Lin mean Society, and in 1879 he presided over the Sheffield meeting of the British Association. He died 24th November 1898. Alloa, a river port and police burgh on the north side of the Forth in the county of Clackmannan, Scotland, 28 miles from Leith by water, and 6^ miles E. of Stirling by rail. The register of shipping included 7 vessels of 374 tons at the end of 1898; in 1898 entered 918 vessels of 177,004 tons, cleared 1056 of 201,576 tons. Coal is the chief article of export, 345,631 tons being shipped in 1898. There are in the town 8 breweries. Spinning mills (its yarn is famous), engineering works, and chemical works are among the industrial features. The parish church has been restored internally, and recent erections are a hall and museum, a town hall and free public library (designed by Mr. Waterhouse, R.A., the gift of Mr. J. Thomson Raton), a county combination hospital, a secondary school, public baths and gymnasium, and an accident hospital. A public park has been opened. One of the schools is an academy. Population of police burgh in 1881, 8812; 1891, 10,754; 1901, 11,417. Allotments and Small Holding's.—As the meaning of these terms varies in different localities, it may be as well to say at once that for the present purpose they are definable as pieces of land detached from cottages, and hired or owned by labouring men to supplement their main income. We do not include any farm, however small, from which the occupier derives his main support by dairying, market-gardening, or other form of la petite cxdture. So also, no account is taken of the tiny garden plot, used for growing vegetables for the table and simple flowers, which is properly an appurtenance of the cottage. Clearing away what is extraneous, the essential point round which much controversy has raged is the labourer’s share in the land. To some extent this depends upon tradition. In agriculture, the oldest of all industries, a cash payment is not even now regarded as discharging the obligations between master and servant. Mr Wilson Fox, in reporting to the Board of Trade on the earnings of agricultural labourers in Great Britain, gives, as a typical survival of an old custom, the case of a shepherd whose total income was calculated at £60 a year, but who got only 4M6 in money, the rest being made up by rights of grazing live-stock and growing crops on his master’s land, and kindred privileges. That is exactly in the spirit that used to pervade agriculture, and doubtless had its origin in the manorial system. If we turn back to the 13th century, from Walter de Henley’s Husbandry it will be seen that practically there were only two classes engaged in agriculture, and corresponding with them were two kinds of land. There were, on the one hand, the employer, the lord, and his demesne land ; on the other, the villans, and the land held in villenage. Putting aside for the moment any discussion of the exact degree of servitude, it

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will be seen that the essence of the bargain was that the villan should be permitted to cultivate a virgate of land for his own use in return for service rendered on the home farm. This is not altered by the fact that the conditions approached those of slavery, that the villans were adscripti glebce, that in some cases their wives and sons were bequeathed by deed to the service of religious houses, and that in many other respects their freedom was limited. Out of this, in the course of centuries, was developed the system prevailing to-day. Lammas lands are indeed a survival from it. There are in the valley of the Lea, and close to London, to take one example, lands allotted annually in little strips till the crops are carried, when, the day being fixed by a reeve, the land becomes a common pasture till the spring closing takes place once more. Perhaps the feature of this old system that bears most directly on the question of allotments was the treatment of the waste of the manor. The lord, like his tenants, was limited by custom as regards the number of beasts he could graze on it. After the havoc of the Black Death in 1349, many changes were necessitated by the scarcity and dearness of labour. It became less unusual for land to be let and for money payment to be accepted instead of services. There was a great demand for wool, and to conduct sheep-farming on a large scale necessitated a re-arrangement of the manor and the enclosure of many common fields under the statute of Merton and the statute of Westminster Second. Nevertheless, up to the 18th century, a vast proportion of agricultural land was technically waste on which rights of common were exercised by yeomen, some of whom had acquired holdings by the ordinary methods of purchase or inheritance, while others had merely squatted and built a house on the waste. It is to this period that belongs a certain injustice to which the peasantry were subject. No reasonable doubt can be entertained of the necessity of enclosure. Husbandry, after long stagnation, was making great advance; and among others, Arthur Young raised his voice against the clumsy inconvenient common fields that were the first to be enclosed. Between 1709 and 1797 no fewer than 3110 Acts, affecting, as far as can be calculated, about 3,000,000 acres, were put into operation. They seem mostly to have been directed to the common fields. In the first half of the 19th century the movement went on apace. In a single year, 1801, no fewer than 119 Acts were passed; and between 1801 and 1842 close on 2000 Acts were passed—many of them expressly directed to the enclosure of wastes and commons. The same thing continued till 1869. It touched the peasant directly and indirectly. The enclosure of the common fields proved most hurtful to the small farmer; the enclosure of the waste injured the labourer by depriving him, without adequate compensation, of such useful privileges as the right to graze a cow, a pig, geese, or other small animals. It also discouraged him by tending to the extinction of small tenancies and freeholds that were no longer workable at a profit when common rights ceased to go with them. The industrious labourer could previously nourish a hope of bettering his condition by obtaining a small holding. Yet, though the labourer suffered, impartial study does not show any intentional injustice. He held a very weak position when those interested in a common affixed to the church door a notice that they intended to petition. As MrCowper said in the House of Commons on 13th March 1844, “the course adopted had been to compensate the owner of the cottage to whom the common right belonged, forgetting the claims of the occupier by whom they were enjoyed ” ; and in the same debate Sir Robert Peel pointed out that not only the rights of the tenant, but those of his successors ought to have been studied. The course adopted divorced the labourer from the soil. S. L —41