Page:Encyclopædia Britannica, Ninth Edition, v. 6.djvu/438

408 the Cormorants was one of the officers of the royal house hold. Now-a-days the practice is nearly disused, though a few gentlemen still follow it for their diversion. When taken out to furnish sport, a strap is fastened round the bird s neck so as, without impeding its breath, to hinder it from swal lowing its captures. Arrived at the waterside, it is cast off. It at once dives and darts along the bottom as swiftly as an arrow in quest of its prey, rapidly scanning every hole or pool. A fish is generally seized within a few seconds of its being sighted, and as each is taken the bird rises to the surface with its capture in its bill. It does not take much longer to dispose of the prize in the dilatable skin of its throat so far as the strap will allow, and the pursuit is recommenced until the bird s gular pouch, capacious as it is, will hold no more. It then returns to its keeper, who has been anxiously watching and encouraging its move ments, and a little manipulation of its neck effects the delivery of the booty. It may then be let loose again, or, if considered to have done its work, it is fed and restored to its perch. The activity the bird displays under water is almost incredible to those who have not seen its perform ances, and in a shallow river scarcely a fish escapes its keen eyes and sudden turns, except by taking refuge under a stone or root, or in the mud that may be stirred up during the operation, and so avoiding observation. Nearly allied to the Cormorant, and having much the same habits is the Shag, or Green Cormorant of some writers (P. yraculus). The Shag (which name in many parts of the world is used in a generic sense) is, however, about one-fourth smaller in linear dimensions, is much more glossy in plumage, and its nuptial embellishment is a nodding plume instead of the white patches of the Cormorant. The easiest diagnostic on examination will be found to be the number of tail-feathers, which in the former are fourteen and in the Shag twelve. The latter, too, is more marine in the localities it frequents, scarcely ever entering fresh or in deed inland waters. [n the south of Europe a still smaller spscies (P. pygmceus) is found. This is almost entirely a fresh -water bird, and is not uncommon on the lower Danube. Other species, to the number perhaps of thirty or more, have been discriminated from other parts of the world, but all have a great general similarity to one another. New Zealand and the west coast of Northern America are particularly rich in birds of this genus, and the species fuund there are the most beautifully decorated of any. All, however, are remarkable for their curiously-formed feet, the four toes of each being connected by a web, for their long stiff tails, and for the absence, in the adult, of any exterior nostrils. When gorged, or when the state of the tide precludes fishing, they are fond of sitting on an elevated perch, often with extended wings, and in this attitude they will remain motionless for a considerable time, as though hanging themselves out to dry, but hardly, as the fishermen report, sleeping the while. It was perhaps this peculiarity that struck the observation of Milton, and prompted his well- known similitude of Satan to a Cormorant (Parad. Lost, iv. 194) ; but when not thus behaving they themselves provoke the more homely comparison of a row of black bottles. Their voracity is proverbial.  CORN LAWS. Legislation on corn was early applied both to the home and foreign trade in this essential pro duce. Roads were so bad, and the chain of home trade so feeble, that there was often scarcity of grain in one part, and plenty in another part of the same kingdom. Export by sea or river to some foreign market was in many cases more easy than the carriage of corn from one market to another within the country. The frequency of local dearths, and the diversity and fluctuation ot prices, were thus extreme. It was out of this general situation that the first corn laws arose, and they appear to have been wholly directed towards lowering the price of corn. Exportation was prohibited, and home merchandize in grain was in no repute or tolera tion. As long as the rent of land, including the extensive domains of the Crown, was paid in kind, the sovereign, the barons, and other landholders had little interest in the price of corn different from that of other classes of people, the only demand for corn being for consumption, and not for re-sale or export. But as rents of land came to be paid in money, the interest of the fanner to be distinguished by a remove from that of the landowner, the difference between town and country to be developed, and the business of society to be more complex, the ruling powers of the state were likely to be actuated by other views ; and hence the force which corn legislation afterward assumed in favour of what was deemed the agricultural interest. But during four centuries after the Conquest the corn law of England simply was that export of corn was prohibited, save in years of extreme plenty under forms of state licence, and that producers carried their surplus grain into the nearest market town, and sold it there for what it would bring among those who wanted it to consume ; and the same rule prevailed in the principal countries of the Continent. This policy, though, as one may argue from its long continuance, probably not felt to be acutely oppressive, was of no avail in removing the evils against which it was directed. On the contrary it prolonged and aggravated them. The pro hibition of export discouraged agricultural improvement, and in so much diminished the security and liberality even of domestic supply ; while the intolerance of any home dealing or merchandize in corn prevented the growth of a commercial and financial interest strong enough to improve the means of transport by which the plenty of one part of the same country could have come to the aid of the scarcity in another.

Apart from this general feudal germ of legislation on corn, the history of the British corn laws, as they have come down to recent times, may be said to have begun with the statute in the reign of Henry VI., 1436, by which exportation was permitted without state licence, when the price of wheat or other corn fell below certain prices. The reason given in the preamble of the statute was that the previous state of the law had compelled farmers to sell their corn at low prices, which was no doubt true, but which also showed the important turn of the tide that had then set in. M Culloch, in his elaborate article in the Commercial Dictionary, to which reference may be made for the most authentic details on this subject, says that the fluctuation of the prices of corn in that age was so great, and beyond all present conception, that &quot; it is not easy to determine whether the exportation price of Gs. 8d. for wheat&quot; [12s. 10d. in present money per quarter] &quot;was above or below the medium price.&quot; But while the medium price of the kingdom must be held to be unascertainable in a remote time, when the medium price in any principal market town of England did not agree with that of another for any year or series of years, one may readily perceive that thi- cultivators of the wheat lands in the south-eastern counties of England, for example, who could frequently have sold their produce in that age to Dutch merchants to better advantage than in their own market towns, or even in London, but were prohibited to export abroad, and yet had no means of distributing their supplies at home so as to realize the highest medium price in England, must have 