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Stephen of Blois was crowned at Westminster Abbey during the Christmas festival (December 26, 1135). As a King of Misrule, he was fitly crowned at Christmastide, and it would have been a good thing for the nation if his reign had been of the ephemeral character which was customary to Lords of Misrule. The nineteen years of his reign were years of disorder unparalleled in any period of our history. On the landing of Henry the First's daughter, "the Empress Matilda," who claimed the English crown for her son Henry, a long struggle ensued, and the country was divided between the adherents of the two rivals, the West supporting Matilda, and London and the East Stephen. For a time the successes in war alternated between the two parties. A defeat at Lincoln left Stephen a prisoner in the hands of his enemies; but after his escape he laid siege to the city of Oxford, where Matilda had assembled her followers. "The Lady" of the English (as Matilda was then called) had retreated into the castle, which, though a place of great strength, proved to be insufficiently victualled. It was surrounded and cut off from all supplies without, and at Christmastide (1142), after a siege of three months, Matilda consulted her own safety by taking flight. On a cold December night, when the ground was covered with snow, she quitted the castle at midnight, attended by four knights, who as well as herself were clothed in white, in order that they might pass unobserved through the lines of their enemies. The adventurous "Lady" made good her escape, and crossing the river unnoticed on the ice, found her way to Abingdon. The long anarchy was ended by the Treaty of Wallingford (1153), Stephen being recognised as king during his life, and the succession devolving upon Matilda's son Henry. A year had hardly passed from the signing of the treaty, when Stephen's death gave Henry the crown, and his coronation took place at Christmastide, 1154, at Westminster.

To bring the richer and poorer materials under the same conditions for the assay, a small weight, say 1 gram of the richer, and a larger weight (5 or 10 grams) of the poorer, substance is weighed up. A method is then adopted which will concentrate the whole of the metal (either during or after solution) in a product which need not necessarily be pure. The work on this product is comparatively easy. In separating small quantities of a substance from a large bulk of impurities, the group separations must not as a rule be too much relied on. Very large precipitates carry down small quantities of bodies not belonging to the group, more especially when there is a tendency to form weak double compounds. The re-dissolving and re-precipitating of bulky precipitates should be avoided.

Thus we have here the origin of a new character, arising from small beginnings, at least in _S. tiliae_, in which species the coloured stripes are a normal specific character. In the other species, _S. populi_ and _S. ocellata_, we find the beginnings of the same variation, in one more rarely than in the other, and we can imagine that, in the course of time, in these two species, coloured lines over the oblique stripes will arise. In any case these spots are the elements of variation, out of which coloured lines _may_ be evolved, if they are combined in this direction through the agency of natural selection. In _S. populi_ the spots are often small, but sometimes it seems as though several had united to form large spots. Whether a process of selection in this direction will arise in _S. populi_ and _S. ocellata_, or whether it is now going on cannot be determined, since we cannot tell in advance what biological value the marking might have for these two species. It is conceivable that the spots may have no selection-value as far as these species are concerned, and may therefore disappear again in the course of phylogeny, or, on the other hand, that they may be changed in another direction, for instance towards imitation of the rust-red fungoid patches on poplar and willow leaves. In any case we may regard the smallest spots as the initial stages of variation, the larger as a cumulative summation of these. Therefore either these initial stages must already possess selection-value, or, as I said before: _There must be some other reason for their cumulative summation_. I should like to give one more example, in which we can infer, though we cannot directly observe, the initial stages.

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