breed. Gone, too, not only from Whittlesea but from the whole world,
is that most exquisite of English butterflies, Lycaena dispar--the
great copper; and many a curious insect more. Ah, well, at least we
shall have wheat and mutton instead, and no more typhus and ague;
and, it is to be hoped, no more brandy-drinking and opium-eating; and
children will live and not die. For it was a hard place to live in,
the old Fen; a place wherein one heard of 'unexampled instances of
longevity,' for the same reason that one hears of them in savage
tribes--that few lived to old age at all, save those iron
constitutions which nothing could break down.

And now, when the bold Fen-men, who had been fighting water by the
help of wind, have given up the more capricious element for that more
manageable servant fire; have replaced their wind-mills by steam-
engines, which will work in all weathers; and have pumped the whole
fen dry--even too dry, as the last hot summer proved; when the only
bit of the primaeval wilderness left, as far as I know, is 200 acres
of sweet sedge and Lastraea thelypteris in Wicken Fen: there can be
no harm in lingering awhile over the past, and telling of what the
Great Fen was, and how it came to be that great flat which reaches
(roughly speaking) from Cambridge to Peterborough on the south-west
side, to Lynn and Tattershall on the north-east, some forty miles and
more each way.

To do that rightly, and describe how the Fen came to be, one must go
back, it seems to me, to an age before all history; an age which
cannot be measured by years or centuries; an age shrouded in mystery,
and to be spoken of only in guesses. To assert anything positively
concerning that age, or ages, would be to show the rashness of
ignorance. 'I think that I believe,' 'I have good reason to