The description of English flora and fauna are exhaustive and accurate. From the forests of the coal period to the weeds last arrived in our hedgerows, from the mammoth to the brown rat which lately drove out our native black rat, our birds, beasts, fishes and insects, herbs and forest trees find describers amongst a group of editors including every name of the first rank amongst students of Natural History.
Coming at last to man and his work, Mr. Boyd Dawkins, the well known author of Early Man in Britain, is the general editor of those chapters of the history which deal with the history of man in our island in the remote days before the coming of Romans or Anglo-Saxons.
England can never forget that she was once a province under the Roman power, for over the country still runs the network of roads which grew up in the wake of the Roman eagles, the Roman tile is in most of our ancient walls, and some fragment of toy or tool from Roman hands is turned wherever the ploughshare runs. Great care therefore has been spent upon the section of the history relating to Roman England, which is directed and edited by Mr. Haverfield, whose name stands for the archæology of Roman England amongst antiquaries all over the world.
Anglo-Saxon remains are dealt with by Mr. C. Hercules Read, of the department of Antiquities at the British Museum, and by his assistant, Mr. Reginald Smith.
Ethnography is in the hands of Mr. G. Laurence Gomme, well known by his work for the Folk-lore Society; and the dialects, so fast disappearing before the face of the School Board, are treated of by Mr. Joseph Wright, the Editor of the Great Dictionary of the English dialects.
There are those for whom English history begins with King William the Conqueror and Domesday Book. The smatterer in antiquities is wont to nourish a belief that Domesday Book is a record easily to be construed although a trifle dull withal; the more advanced antiquary or historian knows Domesday Book for a maze of puzzles and pitfalls, but a record which has not its fellow in the deep interest it holds for English people. Amongst the names of the skilled interpreters of Domesday Book that of Mr. Horace Round stands eminent, and from his hand come the articles upon Domesday Book and its kindred records which will appear in each of the Histories.
In no point will the Victoria Histories contrast more notably with the histories that came before them than in the care with which the story of our national buildings is set forth. The history and description of castles and houses, walled towns, cathedrals, abbeys and churches is
