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 man, surely the liveliest interest and the most human would be awakened as he saw pass before him these forefathers in their habit as they lived, as when the spark of his own life was in their breasts. So then with our histories. A man's interest in his land, in his native county, in the corner of England which chance has brought him to dwell in may be all too sound asleep to be awakened by a pedant's string of names and dates, but it is there to awaken when the past story of town and field is brought to him as a living thing coloured in all its strange and many hues. To know how and in what manner his crowded city grew up from a line of straggling cottages round some industry reckoned a little thing in its beginning, how his county town, dozing through a week broken only by the rustic chatter of market day, was once a point towards which the merchants from far countries came with bales of outlandish merchandise along the packhorse roads — this where a half-dozen farmers' traps come in our day — this is surely knowledge which is good company for a man to carry with him in his daily round. This land, now sheep pasture, was open sea in days ot which County History will tell us, and on the hillside far inland are stones which were a quay to which Roman galleys were moored. This high country dotted with villas was the great forest in whose secret places the strange rites of wood-devils were celebrated. This cornland was marsh and mere, the home of pike and v/aterfowl, and where the mound is at the village end was a castle with inner and outer bailey, keep and drawbridge, the nest of an evil man of foreign speech who oppressed the stubborn English until in full stream of fortune he broke himself against the king's power, a clay pot against a brass pot. Where the duke's towers are to-day there was once a charcoal burner's hut, and where Hodge has his thatched cottage on the down a great Roman proconsul had his villa with its libraries, its baths and hypo- causts, its hall with seagods in tesserae colouring the floor and the loves of Apollo upon the painted walls. Such a story as this might be dull in the telling, but the Victoria County History relies upon no one man's pen, and it is not too much to say that no such body of scholars and specialists has ever been mustered before for a national work. After what fashion the Victoria History will follow its task may be estimated when we consider the roll of distinguished men who are at work for it. The history of each county begins with its geology. The story of the formations which have become England are told by the members of His Majesty's Geological Survey.