But if we say that its most marked tints, whether of back, spots, or belly, are olive-green, scarlet, and gold-the 'yellow belly is certainly what the fisherman notes first as he sees the fish splashing at the end of his cast-then the rainbow trout's leading hues may be set down as invisible green, carmine, and silver. The back is darker than in the native trout, and there are no scarlet spots, but carmine instead, with a heavy spot on the gill cover, which seems to have run,' as they say of paint when laid on a wet surface, and to have lightly stained a pinkish smear all down the side. Otherwise the side is silvery, and the belly is white, with dark spots. The flesh, if in condition, is a fine piuk. Clearly this is a fish everyone would like to possess. By the greatest good luck its habits are such as to make it welcome to those on whose wishes its continuance depends. In the first place it is very fond of eating. Fishermen call this by a more genteel name: the fish is described as 'a free riser.' Whatever the weather may be, rainbow trout are always, or nearly always, hungry, and seldom say 'no' to a good offer. They begin this good habit when tiny fry, and will feed from the bottle'-which they do in the literal sense, the food being an infusion made from the 'soup' of pounded flesh shaken up in a bottle so that the atoms are only visible as a reddish cloud-with a frequency and gusto which your brown trout do not equal. When they are fair-sized fry they are equally voracious. The consequence is that if well supplied with food they grow far faster than brown trout, and they rise far more easily to the fly. When hooked they fight as gamely as our own fish, are if anything better to eat, and more handsome to look upon.

Nor does this exhaust their merits. They alternate with the brown trout as regards spawning. The latter spawn in late autumn and early winter; the rainbow trout in February and March. Spring-spawning fish always have a better chance of survival than winter spawners. The rivers are in better order in spring; there are fewer floods, and vastly more of the invisible food of fish, the entomostraca and their microscopic eggs and larvæ, for the young fish to feed on. Rainbow trout were planted successfully in the Southern States of America, the North Island of New Zealand, and in parts of Germany before they were tried here. They are particularly well suited for ponds and lakes with a little current in them-the smallest trickle in and out seems enough-and live readily in far deeper and stiller rivers than the brown trout affect.

How far the 'rainbow' will prosper in regular north-country trout streams is not yet certain. These are possibly rather too

cold, though there is no evidence of this; and rainbow trout are caught in the river Dove in Derbyshire. But a good instance of their establishment, and an example of how to put wasted waters to good use by stocking them with this fish as well as our indigenous trout, is to be seen not far from the river Dove, in the remote Derbyshire valley of the river Manifold. It is not in the deep-cut romantic vale of the Manifold, where Thor's Cavern and the tumbling waters of the stream seem respectively the homes of the giants and the nymphs, but under a stark and steep limestone hill, covered with green grass and grey stones, and traversed inwardly by the galleries and tunnels of what was once a mighty copper mine. Now that it is worked out no signs of it remain, except a few tunnels and piles of stones on the hillsides, and a long pool, made in the high valley, where the miners used to wash the ore before they took it on pack-horses to be smelted. The pool is just one hundred yards long, pear-shaped, with the broad end lowest down the valley, and without a tree near-just an ordinary bare tarn in an upland valley, where peewits and sheep came to drink. Sir Thomas Wardle, of Leek, who has a house in the vale below, has converted this tarn into a preserve of rainbow and common trout. At the top or narrow end are three small pools divided off, in one of which are kept the fry, which are imported yearly from professed trout hatcheries. When they are yearlings they are turned out in the pool, and being artificially fed grow very fast. They rise so freely to the fly that during last spring, when the water was so clear that no other fish would look at a fly, they gave sport and showed plenty of fight when hooked, even at two o'clock on an exceptionally hot April day.

Some fishermen fear that the rainbow trout may turn cannibal and devour the small fish. That is what the large Thames trout do, and what a very lovely foreign fish, misnamed the brook trout, does. On the whole, however, there is no evidence that rainbow trout lose the sporting taste for the fly. The so-called brook trout is a beautiful creature to look upon: he is most attractive even in the gloomy abode called the 'fish house' at the Zoo. But he is not a trout: he is a char; and, as everyone knows, our lake char are averse from taking a fly at all. So, when one or two enterprising people put their char into the river Colne (the lower tributary of that name, which enters the Thames at Staines), they were first delighted to find that the fish grew fat very fast and then horrified by the discovery that this had been done at the expense of the trout. At last one proprietor netted a char with a trout not greatly smaller

than itself sticking out of its mouth, and was convinced that this experiment in acclimatisation was a rash one. But these fish might do very well in regular char waters, like some of the western lakes, where trout food is scarce. Whether the American shad, which Mr. Moreton Frewen hopes to acclimatise in Irish waters, will be as great an addition to the migratory fishes of the estuaries as the rainbow trout is to the permanent stock in the upper waters, is rather doubtful. But it is a food fish of real value, and no doubt will be welcome if it succeeds in establishing itself on this side of the Atlantic.

After beasts, birds, and fish, come insects. We have laid under contribution the honey-bees of other lands, bees reputed to be even more industrious than our own. According to a recent writer, foreign labour has been introduced among the communities of what were heretofore regarded as the most industrious creatures in the world, and the art of "sweating" bees has been fostered by the employment and example of industrious aliens.' Foreign bees have entered into competition with native industry, and specially bred queen-bees from California, as well as from Italy, Austria, and the islands of the Levant, are regularly sent by post to British bee-keepers. Cyprian, Carniolan, and even Syrian queens are imported, and occasionally whole swarms are sent over-seas to this island. Carniolan bees are pronounced to be the ideal insects for beginners, having all the energy of the mountain races, and a capacity for work transcending that of British worker bees. Italian bees, of Virgilian fame, are also highly esteemed in this country, and come fully up to their classic reputation.

Not the least attractive result of the modern taste for introducing new creatures to the old countries has been the natural inference that it might be not less interesting to bring back some of the lost animals, once common here, but now extinct, or becoming very scarce. Not all of these attempts have succeeded. The great bustard has been turned out on the Yorkshire wolds, but has not thriven, though the capercailzie, the other large game-bird indigenous to northern Europe, prospers in Scotland. But for interest and freshness nothing yet done by any restorer of our old fauna equals the results of Sir Edmund Loder's beaver colony on the brook at Leonardslee. It is probably eight hundred years at least since a beaver made a weir on a British stream; yet on this Sussex brook they are as successful, as enterprising, and as miraculously clever, in their several capacities of engineers, woodmen, weir-builders, and house-architects, as on any Canadian river. They were first given a 'claim' on both sides of the valley, with an iron

fence all round, crossing the stream at two points. In this 'park' were trees of all sizes, from tall beeches and firs to small oaks and alders. Here the beavers have increased and multiplied; and the latest news of their settlement is that they have made a second weir, below that constructed many years ago. If beavers are to flourish on a river they must have a constant depth of water in which to dive, and to cover the entrance to their 'lodges,' even if the surface is frozen thick with ice. As few small rivers or brooks have a constant flow, but are sometimes shallow, sometimes in flood, the beavers make a weir to keep up a head of water. How serious are the difficulties of building and maintaining such a weir every engineer knows. The phenomenal cleverness and industry of beavers are devoted to this end. This is not the place to give details of their log-rolling paths, canals, wood-cutting, and weir-making; but apart from the two former processes, which were not needed in their home at Leonardslee, all the mechanical skill of beavers may there be seen to admiration. They soon made and have ever since maintained a large weir, cutting down all the unprotected trees, except some large beeches and big pines, and using all the branches, large and small, for building with. They left one tree, a small oak, to support what was to be the centre of the weir. Soon a long deep pool was formed above the weir, flooding the adjacent banks and submerging the bases of several large trees which the beavers had begun to cut. One, a large beech, they rooted up, when the water had moistened the earth below. In order to cut down another, round which their pool had formed deep water, they built a platform and then sat on that and gnawed the tree. Later they cut down the supporting oak, probably knowing that the dam was strong enough without it, and began a new weir below.

It is much to be desired that this experiment of 'replanting should be followed elsewhere. Beavers require no large tracts of wild country to live in, and do not seem to be appalled by the neighbourhood of civilisation. There is no reason why they should not, with due protection, flourish again where they flourished in days of old-in the New Forest, for instance, where they were before the Normans came. No animals display more ingenuity or prove more convincingly the value of harmonious co-operation; and the spectacle of these happy, clever, and industrious creatures, re-established on our rivers, might supply a valuable object-lesson for the village school, and form a new attraction in depopulated country districts.

ART. XI. JOHN DONNE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES.

1. The Life and Letters of John Donne. By Edmund Gosse. London: Heinemann, 1899.

2. John Donne. By Augustus Jessopp, D.D. (Leaders of Religion.) London: Methuen, 1897.

3. Poems. By Thomas Carew.

London: 1640.

4. Steps to the Temple; Sacred Poems, with other Delights of the Muses. By Richard Crashaw. London: 1646.

5. The Temple. By George Herbert.

6. Poems. By Henry Vaughan. 1646.

London: 1633.

7. Silex Scintillans, or Sacred Poems and Private Ejaculations. By the same. London 1650.

THO

HOUGH all the world agrees that different ages have had and will have different standards of taste, the reason for so obvious a fact is not obvious. Why should taste be arbitrary? Why should it not proceed from less to more knowledge, laying down canons of beauty at each stage, which will not be questioned by those who come after? If all canons of beauty were arbitrary, we might acquiesce in the fluctuations of taste: we should know that there is nothing to be known in that region; but some canons appear to be beyond dispute, and many works of art are universally acknowledged to be beautiful.

Taste may be defined as appreciation of beauty within certain limits. It has nothing to do with the ultimate judgment of the world; but for the moment its dictates have authority as delivered by those who set the fashion. Taste is the sifting of fashion by those who claim to lead the fashion. Or are we to give a narrower definition to taste, and restrict its meaning to the appreciation of various aspects or facets of beauty which are attractive to one or another state of society and stage of civilisation? If so, and if taste is concerned not with the greater but with the smaller problems of beauty, it is not difficult to understand why what is admirable to one generation may be ridiculous to the next, as certainly is the case; why Bernini's sculptures, for instance, which were the perfection of le bon goût in their day, are now looked upon as absurdities, and at some future time may be admired again: why Watteau's pictures had their day and their eclipse and are again in vogue: why the decadent architecture of the latest Gothic period was neglected in the Renaissance period, and again in the Gothic revival, and is nowadays once more in favour.

Perhaps we shall come nearer the truth if we assume that in