foot in Britain and had made the
Roman camps, the remains of which still mark the chalk downs of
England.

"Except, it may be, by raising a few sepulchral mounds, such as
those which still, here and there, break the flowing contours of
the Downs, man's hands had made no mark upon it; and the thin
veil of vegetation which overspread the broad-backed heights and
the shelving sides of the coombs was unaffected by his industry.
The native grasses and weeds, the scattered patches of gorse,
contended with one another for possession of the scanty surface
soil; they fought against the droughts of summer, the frosts of
winter, and the furious gales, which swept with unbroken force,
now from the Atlantic, and now from the North Sea, at all times
of the year; they filled up, as they best might, the gaps made in
their ranks by all sorts of overground and underground ravagers.
One year with another, an average population, the floating
balance of the unceasing struggle for existence among the
indigenous plants, maintained itself. It is as little to be
doubted that an essentially similar state of nature prevailed in
this region for many thousand years before the coming of Caesar;
and there is no assignable reason for denying that it might
continue to exist through an equally prolonged futurity except
for the intervention of man."

This present state of nature, he explained, is only a fleeting phase
of a process that has gone on for millions of years. Under the thin
layer of soil are the chalk cliffs, hundreds of feet thick and
witnesses of the entirely different phases of the struggle that went
on while the cliffs were being formed at the bottom of the chalk sea,
when the vegetation of the nearest land was as different from the
existing vegetation as that is different from the trees and flowers of
an African forest.

"Before the deposition of the chalk, a vastly longer period
elapsed, throughout which it is easy to follow the traces of the
same process of ceaseless modification and of the same
internecine struggle for existence of living things; and when we
can go no further back, it is not because there is any reason to
think we have reached the beginning, but because the trail of the
most ancient life remains hidden or has become obliterated."

The state of nature, then, is a fleeting and imper