climates, have disappeared, and are now only found in a fossil state in the northern regions of our globe; but we cannot see why trees, and almost all vegetation, have disappeared from ground on which they formerly flourished, and where the same climate and soil still produce the same kind of trees and vegetation on other ground in the neighbourhood. It would be charity to us unscientific travellers, if the geologist, who has so many floods and oceans with drifting icebergs to spare, would bestow upon us an inundation of peat earth floating in a stream which has overflowed all the districts and regions of the north, in which nothing but heath will now grow, and has overthrown and submerged all the forests and all the forest soils which once covered them. There is in the science of geology nothing so handy as a flood to account for all phenomena on the face of the earth. The only difficulty with those geological floods, is how to get them and how to get rid of them; for if they add to or diminish the bulk, weight, or gravitation of our planet towards the sun and the other celestial bodies, which floods, that is, accumulations of matter in a fluid state, of such enormous depth as to float ice-fields over our continents, would be very apt to do, we would have the astronomer royal from Greenwich about our ears for altering the planet's revolutions and his true time. On the barren heathy back of the peninsula, houses and villages are few and far between; yet there are more people employed than one would expect. The cutting, drying, and carrying of peats is a very considerable branch of industry; and it is not merely each family producing what it consumes of fuel, but is a branch of industry bringing money to the labourer and to the proprietor. Every family in Hamburgh and Altona lays in several waggon loads of peats, or buys them in the market daily or weekly, as we buy coals. Peats are much cheaper fuel than wood; and where iron stoves are used, peats, containing less sulphur than coal, give a more agreeable heat. On approaching Kiel the scene changes; and although there is very little difference of elevation above the sea-level, there is the difference of a much better soil. We are in a country of small fields, enclosed by hedges and rising into gentle elevations of ground cultivated to the summits, or crowned with groves of magnificent beech, elm, oak, and lime trees (none of the fir tribe are to be seen); and in the bottoms in which the slopes meet, is generally a small quiet lake reflecting the peasant's house on the bank, or a peat moss, evidently once a lake, on which the farmer is mowing the bog hay, or cutting peats for his winter fuel. The slopes and summits of these gentle elevations appear to be of excellent soil; for they are carrying heavy crops of rye, wheat, barley, oats, and buckwheat, pease, rape, and sown grasses. No land, however, appears in preparation for a turnip crop; but a considerable breadth is in naked fallow. A large proportion of the fields is in old grass kept for hay and pasture, and not broken up for grain crops. The husbandry, implements, horses, cattle, are very like those of the Anglo-Saxon districts of the South of England, such as Kent and Surrey. The railway extends to Rendsburg on the Eyder, about twenty miles from Kiel; but I was tired of the unsatisfactory way of travelling by rail, and have stopped at Kiel. Rendsburg also being a frontier for tress, and in the occupation of Austrian troops on one side of the Eyder, and of Danish on the other, might not be so agreeable a halting place for an idle traveller wandering about the country asking questions of every one, and with no apparent business. In 1848 I was at Frankfort, when the parliament in the Paulus Kirche was in the height of its delirium and power, and the visionary grandeur of the "New Germania," with its black, red, and yellow flag, its future armies, fleets, and predominance among European nations, filled every head, and gave sound and motion to every tongue. But Frankfort was only the centre of the intellectual or imaginary, not of the practical action of the dreams or schemes of the philosophers, professors, and eminent literary men, who, in that parliament-or rather in their clubs, which ruled their parliament - held for a time in their hands the future fate and well-being of the sovereigns and people of Germany. The practical action of this great movement, and of its government at Frankfort, was developed here, in this peninsula, and especially at Kiel. The drama was composed at Frankfort; but here, in Holstein and Sleswick, was the theatre on which it was played out; and here only can its wisdom, its practical application, its suitableness to the wants, social state, and well-being of the people for whom it was composed, be examined and judged of. The Notes which I published in 1850, on the political and social condition of the continental people in 1848-49, were written while the people were still in the paroxysm of their delirium and raving about a "New Germany —an united, centralised government of forty millions of people of Teutonic race and tongue, with a common nationality. The work was favourably received by the public as a contribution to the means of forming a right judgment of the men, measures, and spirit of our remarkable times. The fever has subsided in Germany; the crisis is past; and the Notes relative to the great German agitation and movement of 1848-49-50 would be incomplete without some inquiry into the real motives and merits of the promoters and leaders of that agitation and movement now that the results are visible, the mirage of enthusiasm is dispelled, and objects are seen in their true places and magnitudes. Kiel is a favourable station for making such inquiries and observations. It was the centre of action, as Frankfort was the centre of speculation. The "Schleswig-Holstein" war, which was represented as the first appearance of the "New Germany" in vindication of her rights and in display of her power among the European nations, was planned, begun, and carried on at Kiel. I propose on this tour to write such observations as may occur to me from time to time on this subject, without studying to connect them into formal dissertations. They may be sometimes contradictory or incorrect, and often trivial; but they will be real impressions and reflections, given as they arise or suggest themselves, in a country which was the seat of a bloody and remarkable war, and in which a weak power, with a total population of only a million and a half of souls, appears to have withstood, and at last to have signally defeated, the army of a power with forty millions. CHAP. II. KIEL THE TEKELIA OF PTOLEMY-ITS FIORD IMPORTANCE AS A LEICHTSINNIGES VOLK. THE UNEMPLOYABLES. IN ENGLAND AND IN GERMANY. - KIEL, 1851. This is a lively little town of about 12,000 inhabitants. It must be the most ancient town in the north of Europe, if it be, as the antiquaries of Kiel assert, the Tekelia of Ptolemy the geographer, who wrote in the second century of our era. They say it is still called Tokiel or Tomkiel by the Platt Deutsch speaking peasantry of the neighbourhood. Its situation is a better proof of its antiquity than its name. It stands on a narrow peninsula, surrounded on three sides by the water of the fiord, or inlet of the Baltic, called the bay of Kiel, and must, from the earliest time in which people congregated together for mutual support and safety, have been a chosen spot for men to defend, or to escape from by sea, or land, if overpowered by an enemy. But there is nothing ancient in the streets, houses, or churches. The north of Germany is not a country of stone; and here, as in all northern towns, the most ancient buildings seldom reach back to the sixteenth century. The use of wooden frame-work, built into the brick walls, prevents, by the decay of the wood, any very ancient houses remaining in their |