know that she had omitted anything, but it was but a poor bill for gentlefolks to pay.' If the members of the Yacht Squadron, whose trim craft give so much life and animation to its waters, and whose annual Regatta collects so much of the wealth and fashion of the land, or the gay crowds who throng the pier in every variety of fashionable costume, were to have a view of Ryde as it appeared to Fielding, they would not easily recognize their favourite resort. The impassable gulf of deep mud, which could neither be traversed by walking nor swimming,' no friendly pier yet crossing its treacherous surface, rendered Ryde for near one-half of the twenty-four hours inaccessible by friend or foe.' Until the present pier was opened in 1815 the way of approach was that commemorated by Marryat in his 'Poor Jack; when the wherries came in as far as they could, and were met by a horse and cart, which took out the passengers and carried them through the mud and water to the hard ground.' Amusing tales are still told of inconvenient accidents occasioned by jibbing or unruly horses, or the loss of the 'cart-pins,' which involved the precipitation of the whole freight backwards into the ooze and slime. Cowes, which was an earlier yachting centre, and still claims official precedence of Ryde in this respect, cannot go back, as a town, beyond the latter part of the sixteenth century. The two forts, seen and described by Leland, very soon after their erection by Henry VIII. from the materials of Beaulieu Abbey,— The two great Cows that in loud thunder roar, This on the eastern, that on the western shore,' gave the name to the locality, which has been transferred to the little town that gradually, after the erection of a Custom-house for the Island in 1575, clustered round the western Cow or fort. Its convenience as a port and harbour and landing-place was soon recognized, and its growth in prosperity, though not rapid, has been solid and steady. Of late years the residence of Her Majesty and the Royal Family at Osborne has supplied an additional stimulus to the commercial activity of West Cowes, and of her younger sister on the eastern bank. Cowes is a very attractive place when seen from the water. The houses climb up a steep wooded hill rising from the water, crowned by a stately church and a number of handsome villas. But the favourable impression is hardly maintained on landing. Henry VIII.'s blockhouse has become the Yacht Club-house. Returning to the eastern side of the island, the decayed corporate town of Brading, with its grey spire-crowned church, its half-timbered half-timbered houses, crumbling town-hall, bull-ring and stocks, seems to belong to a bygone age. It will always possess an interest from its connection with Wilfrid, the Evangelist of the island; but there is not much to make us linger, and we pass on after casting a glance over the broad tidal-basin, Brading Haven, into which the silver Yar, after forcing its way through the chalk downs, expands before it joins the sea, and reflecting how greatly the prospect would have lost in beauty if Sir Hugh Myddleton's engineering operations for draining the haven, and converting it into corn-fields and pastures, had not been allowed to become abortive through the want of decision and energy or the part of its promoters. While Brading has been sinking, her daughters of Sandown and Shanklin have been rising, and the once tiny villages-Sandown, indeed, was no more than a cluster of fishermen's cottages with a humble wayside-inn-have assumed the aspect and importance of considerable towns. The bright, cheerful, little town of Sandown, with its fine expanse of dry level sand, peopled in the summer and autumn months with tribes of happy children who, like those who frolicked on the shores of the gaan three thousand years ago, 'In wanton play with hands and feet o'erthrow The mound of sand which late in play they raised,'— Iliad, xv. 424, 425.-Lord Derby's Translation. is inseparably connected with the memory of John Wilkes, of the 'North Briton,' who may be said to have discovered the place, and who by the erection of his 'Villakin' in 1788, which he never tired of praising and adorning, first showed it to be a possible residence for a gentleman. Wilkes's letters to his daughter are full of amusing descriptions of the place and his neighbours, his difficulty in obtaining provisions, his love for the feathered tribes, the kindness of the gentry of the vicinity in supplying his wants, his visits to them and theirs to him. One Sunday, he tells his dear Polly,' going over to church at Shanklin, he met Garrick and his charming wife, who took him back with them to Mr. Fitzmaurice's seat at Knighton, at which they were staying. Here he found Sir Richard Worsley and some of his Neapolitan acquaintances. Sir Richard engaged him to visit him at Appuldurcombe on the Monday, where he entertained the whole Knighton set' at a grand breakfast, Mrs. Garrick, as usual, the most captivating of the whole circle.' Wilkes numbered the Hills of St. Boniface, the Bassetts, the Oglanders, and all the leading island gentry among his associates; and we gather from this correspondence a very pleasing idea of the genial and refined refined hospitality which prevailed among them. The fort at Sandown, erected by Henry VIII., once washed away by the sea, and only saved from the same fate a second time by very expensive engineering works, not long since boasting of a well-salaried governor, has been finally pulled down in our own day, and a new fort erected of granite cased with iron, as one member of the formidable and costly line of coast defences, by which it is fondly hoped the Isle of Wight has been rendered impregnable. Lovely as Shanklin is, and must ever remain with its chine, its cliffs, and its woods, in spite of the worst that enterprising house-builders have done and are doing to vulgarise it, it must not detain us. We may, however, remark in passing that Shanklin was one of the strongholds of Jacobitism in the Isle of Wight. The old summer-house in the Manor House garden is still pointed out in which meetings of the adherents of the exiled royal family used to be held, and at which, with the old Squire of Shanklin at their head, the island gentlemen would drink the health of Charles Edward on bended knee.* In later years, before it had become so crowded a resort, Shanklin was a very favourite place for Oxford reading parties. Bishops Hampden and Hinds passed the long vacation of 1812 here, 'occupied,' writes the former, with our books the greater part of every day, and having no recreation beyond a tête-à-tête walk along the sea-shore: never even making an excursion into other parts of the attractive scenery of the island.' They had been preceded by their friend, Archbishop Whately, who read here for his Oriel Fellowship. 6 We must, however unwillingly, leap over the exquisite scenery between Shanklin and Ventnor: Luccombe with its bowl-shaped chine and rude fishermen's huts, full of charms to the landscape-painter; the romantic ruin of the East-end Landslip, created within living memory by the subsidence of the inferior strata; Bonchurch, the portal of the Undercliff, with its cliff walls and rugged, isolated rocks, and sheltered nooks, and picturesque residences, 'in the very style a poet would have *A century ago, in the days of the old squires, Shanklin is described as a Utopia of friendship and mutual good will. The inhabitants,' writes Hassell, 'are like one large family. Ill nature is not known among them. Obliging in the extreme, they seem to be the happiest when their visitants are best pleased.' Nor was Shanklin peculiar in this respect. The quiet villages of the island, where the gentry had lived for generations in the midst of their humbler friends and dependants, knowing everybody and manifesting a kindly interest in all, formed much such parochial Goshens as the gentle Mary Leadbeater describes Ballitore before the Irish Insurrection, When the temporary absence of a neighbour caused a shade of gloom, and his return a ray of sunshine; when the sickness or misfortune of one was felt by sympathy through the whole body.'-Leadbeater Papers and Correspondence. imagined imagined and a painter designed';* still, in Dr. Arnold's words, 'the most beautiful place on the sea-coast on this side Genoa '† and devote a few closing words to Ventnor-the Metropolis of the Undercliff. Forty years since this now large and flourishing town was the tiniest of fishing hamlets. A group of low-thatched cottages on the shore of the Cove, a picturesque mill hanging on the steep cliff above, down which the mill-stream dashed in a pretty cascade; a low-roofed wayside inn, the thatch of which a tall man could easily reach; and a humble dwelling or two hard by, formed the whole of Ventnor. And such it might have remained had not the late distinguished physician, Sir James Clark, discovered the curative power of its genial climate in pulmonary disease, and recommended it as a winter resort for invalids. Consumptive patients resorted to Ventnor in crowds. Its praises as the English Madeira' were said and sung by grateful visitors, and the place speedily sprang into eminence and celebrity as one of the best of the health-resorts of Southern England. And if the fashion has in some measure turned, and Bournemouth and other younger rivals are rivalling, or even surpassing Ventnor in public estimation, the logic of facts will ever continue to argue very strongly in favour of it as a residence for the invalid who seeks to escape the cold blasts of our northern winter, and the still more perilous alternations of our treacherous spring, without the fatigue of foreign travel, and the numberless miseries inseparable from a winter passed where English comforts are unknown. The Registrar-General's returns prove that Ventnor almost bears the palm of all English health-resorts. Its microscopic mortality, notwithstanding the large number of consumptive patients carried there in the final stages of their insidious disease simply to die, is a triumphant proof of the remarkable salubrity of this favoured locality. While on this subject we must not omit to call attention to the most recent development of sanitary agencies, whose beneficent object is to place the benefits of the genial climate of the Undercliff within the reach of a class which without such help must be permanently shut out from them. We refer to the National Consumption Hospital erected on the cottage or detached block system in one of the most beautiful and sheltered spots in the Undercliff, of which the first stone was laid two years since by the Princess Louise on behalf of her Royal mother, who from the first has manifested a warm interest in its success, and which is entering on a career of extensive usefulness destined long to perpetuate the name of its energetic originator, Dr. Arthur Hill Hassall. * Sterling. † Arnold's Life and Correspondence,' vol. ii. p. 45. ART. ART. II.-1. Researches into the Early History of Mankind and the Development of Civilisation. By Edward Burnet Tylor. London, 1865. 2. Primitive Culture. By the Same. London, 1871. 3. Primitive Society. By the Same, in the Contemporary Review for April and June 1873. 4. Prehistoric Times. By Sir John Lubbock, Bart. 2nd edition. London, 1869. 5. The Origin of Civilisation and the Primitive Condition of Man. By the Same. London, 1870. THAT HAT the proper study of mankind is Man seems to be a proposition the truth of which is being now forced upon us with peculiar intensity. In spite of the expulsion of the 'microcosm' by astronomy from the centre of the material universe, he is at present acquiring yet fresh claims to be considered the one key whereby may be unlocked the mysteries of the macrocosm.' With the dispelling of that dream in which the little planet Tellus appeared the great solid nucleus of encircling crystal spheres existing only for its sake, began the vigorous prosecution of the physical sciences--the investigation of nature external to man. This investigation having reached a stage rendering possible the exposition of all non-human phenomena as the multifold co-ordinated and harmonised manifestations of one great process-a theory of evolution-it remains to test the universal adequacy of that theory by its application to the phenomena presented to us by Man in his highest existing condition and as the wild tenant of the forest-the Homo sylvaticus. If all the phenomena which human life presents are capable of being brought under the laws which regulate inferior organisms, it is hardly possible to exaggerate the amount of support which would thereby be given to the universality of that theory. Moreover, it is plain that in such a case all those who deem the theory of evolution sufficient to account for the origin of all other animals, must logically admit it as sufficient to account for his origin also. At present there are two very distinct views as to the origin of the animal population of this planet. I. The first of these views-the monistic hypothesis-asserts that one uniform law has presided over the whole, since all such creatures are distinguished from one another by differences which are differences of degree only, and not of kind. II. The other of these views-the dualistic hypothesis-asserts that man (whatever may have been the case with brute animals) must have originated in some special manner, since the difference between |