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HISTORY OF ENGLAND.

CHAP.

III.

sued in Cranbourne Chase for his fur, reputed inferior only tothat of the sable, Fen eagles, measuring more than nine feetbetween the extremities of the wings, preyed on fish along thecoast of Norfolk. On all the downs, from the British Channelto Yorkshire, huge bustards strayed in troops of fifty or sixty,and were often hunted with greyhounds. The marshes ofCambridgeshire and Lincolnshire were covered during somemonths of every year by immense clouds of cranes. Some ofthese races the progress of cultivation has extirpated. Ofothers the numbers are so much diminished that men crowd togaze at a specimen as at a Bengal tiger, or a Polar bear.*

The progress of this great change can nowhere be moreclearly traced than in the Statute Book. The number of in-closure acts passed since King George the Second came to thethrone exceeds four thousand. The area inclosed under theauthority of those acts exceeds, on a moderate calculation,ten thousand square miles. How many square miles, whichwere formerly uncultivated or ill cultivated, have, during'thesame period, been fenced and carefully tilled by the pro-prietprs^ without any application to the legislature, can onlybe conjectured. But it seems highly probable that a fourthpart of England has been, in the course of little more than acentury, turned from a wild into a garden.

Even in those parts of the kingdom which at the close ofthe reign of Charles the Second were the best cultivated, thefarming, though greatly improved since the civil war, was notsuch as would now be thought skilful. To this day noeffectual steps have been taken by public authority for thepurpose of obtaining accurate accounts of the produce of theEnglish soil. The historian must therefore follow, with some

* Sec While’s Selborne; Bell’s History of British Quadrupeds;Gentleman’s Recreation, 1686; Aubrey’s Natural History of Wiltshire,1685; Morion's History of Northamptonshire, 1H2; Willoughby’s Orni-thology, by Ray, 1618; Latham’s General Synopsis of Birds; and SirThomas Browne's Account of Birds found in Norfolk.