land is rising at the present time; and in the New World there are vast districts in which it suddenly changed its level for a higher, during the present century. But it by no means follows that, because the line of the land fluctuates, that of the sea is stable: exactly the reverse inference would, we should think, be the sounder one.

THE MEADOWS.

THE Town Council improvements in the large tract of flat marshy ground on the south side of Edinburgh so well known as "the Meadows," are progressing daily, and bid fair to be very decided improvements indeed. The large boulderstones which lined the edges of the tract in a broad belt of some sixty or eighty yards across, are in the course of being broken up by gunpowder and the hammer; several thousand yards of drains have been formed; and at present (1842) the surface of the entire area presents a broken scene of recently felled trees, loose heaps of newly fractured stone, pyramids of draining tiles, and large accumulations of soil, that vary in colour, according to the character of the bottom, from white to rusty brown, and from deep black to gray. In a few weeks, however, the whole will be smoothed over; and if there be virtue in labour well directed, and tile-draining according to the most approved mode, we shall soon have a continuous sheet of green dry sward for an unwholesome marshy hollow; and the last vestiges of the ancient Borough Loch shall have disapappeared. All our readers have heard of the Borough Moor: it has been graphically described by Scott in "Marmion," as the site of the encampment of the unhappy James previous to his fatal march to Flodden. Fields, and gardens, and tasteful villas, now cover it over: there remains not a vestige that maintains the ancient character: its very name

has become a thing of tradition: but it still exists in the pages of Scott as a wild broken moor, partially covered by the remains of an ancient forest; and we have but to give our imaginations up to the poet, in order to see it still, with the white tents shining from amid the mingling foliage,the standard of Scotland rising tall in the midst,—groupes of a picturesque soldiery scattered over the sylvan area,—and the dusky town, strongly walled and jealously guarded, looming in the back-ground. But while the recollection of the Borough Moor has been thus preserved, the Borough Loch, its neighbour, has been less fortunate; though, at the time when the poet represents Marmion as riding over Blackford, it must have formed as marked a feature in the landscape as the moor itself;—it must have stretched a broad blue sheet of water between the half-felled forest and the city,—the home of the pike and the perch, and the occasional haunt of the coot and the sea-gull; and its huge boulder-stones, one of which is even now yielding its ponderous bulk to the expansive force of gunpowder, and flinging up its fragments into the air, must have stood up along its sedgy shore, amid thickets of reeds and flags, and wide-spread shallows covered by the white flowering trefoil.

The Borough Loch seems to have been one of a chain of small shallow lakes, which, until a comparatively late period, studded the bottom of the long hollow valley, which extends onwards from Duddingston towards Falkirk, and which is bounded on the north by the ridge of low trap eminences to which Corstorphine Hill belongs, and on the south by the resembling ridge to which Blackford and Craiglockhart Hills belong. A loch in the neighbourhood of Corstorphine, now,

like the Borough Loch, a green hollow, had its boat and its duck-shooting as late, it is said, as the middle of the last century. Edinburgh had a lake, it is evident, at one period, in each of its three nearly parallel hollows,-that to the north of the Castle, now occupied by the Prince's Street Gardens,

that through which the Cowgate runs,-and that more especially the subject of our present description, and of the Town Council improvements. Duddingston and Lochend still exist unchanged. The great extent of water exposed in the line of the valley had its marked effect on the atmosphere and the general health of the inhabitants; the crops of the farmer suffered severely from cold fogs; and diseases now scarce known in Scotland were comparatively common in the district. The records of the Medical Faculty in Edinburgh do not extend to a period by any means remote. We have been informed, however, by a medical friend, that among their earlier entries, agues and marsh fevers occur as usual diseases of the town and neighbourhood. The diseases of the Scottish capital in those days seem to have resembled the diseases of Canada and the Low Countries now. Combe adverts to the fact in one of his writings, but perhaps without taking sufficiently into account the numerous lakes of the district. In the causes to which he chiefly refers,-causes connected with an unskilful and slovenly style of husbandry, and the filth and moisture suffered to accumulate around the dwellings of the country people,-it resembled all the rest of Scotland at the period. "A gentleman who died about ten years ago, at an advanced period of life," says the writer, in a work now fourteen years before the public, "told me that six miles from Edinburgh the country was so unhealthy in

his youth, that every spring the farmers and their servants were seized with fever and ague, and needed regularly to undergo bleeding and a course of medicine, to prevent attacks, or to restore them from their effects. After, however, an improved system of agriculture and draining was established, and vast pools of stagnant water, formerly left between the ridges of fields, were removed, dunghills carried to a distance from the door, and the houses themselves made more spacious and commodious, every symptom of ague and marsh-fever disappeared from the district." The fact is at once curious and instructive. Rousseau could describe the savage state as the state of nature; but facts such as these,-facts furnishing the true solution of the problem why, as established by our lifeinsurance tables, human life should be more extended now than in the days of our grandfathers,-unanswerably demonstrate the contrary. They show that, so natural is civilization to man, that he cannot live out his proper term without it.

It would be difficult for the young geologist to find a more instructive walk, or a walk in which he will find more that serves to connect the agency of existing causes with some of the earlier geological phenomena, than that along the open drains of the Meadows. He will detect in it a lacustrine deposit in the very act of passing into dry land, and find not a few of those appearances that seem so puzzling in the ancient formations, not yet dissociated from those every-day operations of nature through which they were produced. May we ask the reader to accompany us for just a few hundred yards along one of the deeper drains. And, first, let us mark the varieties of bottom. That leaden-coloured earth, which rose to the spade in large adhesive masses like clay, but which is