Real and Sham Natural History

I SUPPOSE it is the real demand for an article that leads to its counterfeit, otherwise the counterfeit would stand a poor show. The growing demand for nature-books within the past few years has called forth a very large crop of these books, good, bad, and indifferent, — books on our flowers, our birds, our animals, our butterflies, our ferns, our trees; books of animal stories, animal romances, nature-study books, and what not. There is a long list of them. Some of these books, a very small number, are valuable contributions to our natural history literature. Some are written to meet a fancied popular demand. The current is setting that way; these writers seem to say to themselves, Let us take advantage of it, and float into public favor and into pecuniary profit with a nature-book. The popular love for stories is also catered to, and the two loves, the love of nature and the love of fiction, are sought to be blended in the animal story-books, such as Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts’s Kindred of the Wild, Mr. William Davenport Hulbert’s Forest Neighbors, Mr. Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, and the Rev. William J. Long’s School of the Woods. Only the last two writers seem to seek to profit by the popular love for the sensational and the improbable, Mr. Long, in this respect, quite throwing Mr. Thompson Seton in the shade. It is Mr. Long’s book, more than any of the others, that justifies the phrase “Sham Natural History,” and it is to it and to Mr. Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Alone Have Known, if I may be allowed playfully to amend his title to correspond with the facts, that I shall devote the major part of this article.

But before I proceed with this discussion, let me briefly speak of the books that have lately appeared in this field that are real contributions to the literature of the subjects of which they treat. All of Mr. Bradford Torrey’s bird studies merit this encomium. They have a rare delicacy, sweetness, and charm. They are the product of a shy, gentle, alert, birdlike nature, dwelling fondly, lovingly, searchingly, upon our songsters and the scenes amid which they live.

Mrs. Fannie Hardy Eckstorm’s Bird Book and her work on the Woodpeckers are fresh, original, and stimulating productions. Mr. Leander S. Keyser’s Birds of the Rockies tells me just what I want to know about the Western birds, — their place in the landscape and in the season, and how they agree with and differ from our Eastern species. Mr. Keyser belongs to the noble order of walkers and trampers, and is a true observer and bird-lover. Florence Merriam’s (now Mrs. Bailey) books on Western bird life and Mr. Frank M. Chapman’s various publications, apart from their strict scientific value, afford a genuine pleasure to all nature - lovers. Mr. Ernest Ingersoll has been writing gracefully and entertainingly upon the lives of our birds and wild animals for more than twenty years, and his books foster a wholesome love for these things.

Another book that I have read with genuine pleasure is Mr. Dallas Lore Sharp’s Wild Life near Home, — a book full of charm and of real observation; the fruit of a deep and abiding love of Nature, and of power to paint her as she is. How delightful his sketch of the possum, and how true! Mr. Sharp is quite sure the possum does not faint when he “plays possum,” as some naturalists have urged: “A creature that will deliberately walk into a trap, spring it, eat the bait, then calmly lie down and sleep until the trapper comes, has no nerves. I used to catch a possum, now and then, in the box-trap set for rabbits. It is a delicate task to take a rabbit from such a trap, for, give him a crack of chance and away he bolts to freedom. Open the lid carefully when there is a possum inside, and you will find the old fellow curled up, with a sweet smile of peace on his face, fast asleep. Shake the trap and he rouses yawningly, with a mildly injured air, offended at your rudeness, and wanting to know why you should wake an innocent possum from so safe and comfortable a bed. He blinks at you inquiringly, and says, ‘ Please, sir, if you will be so kind as to shut the door and go away, I will finish my nap. ’ And while he is saying it, before your very eyes, off to sleep he goes.”

Of all the nature - books of recent years, I look upon Mr. Sharp’s as the best; but in reading it, one is keenly aware of the danger that is always lurking near the essay naturalist,— lurking near me as well as Mr. Sharp, — the danger of making too much of what we see and describe, — of putting in too much sentiment, too much literature,— in short, of valuing these things more for the literary effects we can get out of them than for themselves. This danger did not beset Gilbert White. He always forgets White, and remembers only nature. His eye is single. He tells the thing for what it is. He is entirely serious. He reports directly upon what he sees and knows without any other motive than telling the truth. There is never more than a twinkle of humor in his pages, and never one word of style for its own sake. Who in our day would be content to write with the same moderation and self-denial ? Yet it is just these sane, sincere, moderate books that live.

In Mr. Charles G. D. Roberts’s Kindred of the Wild one finds much to admire and commend, and but little to take exception to. The volume is in many ways the most brilliant collection of animal stories that has appeared. It reaches a high order of literary merit. Many of the descriptive passages in it of winter in the Canadian woods are of great beauty. The story called A Treason of Nature, describing the betrayal and death of a bull moose by hunters who imitated the call of the cow moose, is most striking and effective. True it is that all the animals whose lives are portrayed — the bear, the panther, the lynx, the hare, the moose, and others — are simply human beings disguised as animals; they think, feel, plan, suffer, as wo do; in fact, exhibit almost the entire human psychology. But in other respects they follow closely the facts of natural history, and the reader is not deceived ; he knows where he stands. Of course it is mainly guesswork how far our psychology applies to the lower animals. That they experience many of our emotions there can be no doubt, but that they have intellectual and reasoning processes like our own, except in a very rudimentary form, admits of grave doubt. But I need not go into that vexed subject here. They are certainly in any broad generalization our kin, and Mr. Roberts’s book is well named and well done.

Yet I question his right to make his porcupine roll himself into a ball when attacked, as he does in his story of the panther, and then on a nudge from the panther roll down a snowy incline into the water. I have tried all sorts of tricks with the porcupine and made all sorts of assaults upon him, at different times, and I have never yet seen him assume the globular form Mr. Roberts describes. It would not be the best form for him to assume, because it would partly expose his vulnerable under side. The one thing the porcupine seems bent upon doing at all times is to keep right side up with care. His attitude of defense is crouching close to the ground, head drawn in and pressed down, the circular shield of large quills upon his back opened and extended as far as possible, and the tail stretched back rigid and held close upon the ground. Now come on, he says, if you want to. The tail is his weapon of active defense; with it he strikes up like lightning, and drives the quills into whatever they touch. In his chapter called In Panoply of Spears, Mr. Roberts paints the porcupine without taking any liberties with the creature’s known habits. He paints one characteristic of the porcupine as felicitously as Mr. Sharp paints one of the possum: “As the porcupine made his resolute way through the woods, the manner of his going differed from that of all the other kindreds of the wild. He went not furtively. He had no particular objection to making a noise. He did not consider it necessary to stop every little while, stiffen himself to a monument of immobility, cast wary glances about the gloom, and sniff the air for the taint of enemies. He did not care who knew of his coming, and he did not greatly care who came. Behind his panoply of biting spears he felt himself secure, and in that security he moved as if he held in fee the whole green, shadowy, perilous, woodland world.”

The father of the animal story as we have it to-day was doubtless Charles Dudley Warner, who, in his A-Hunting of the Deer, forever killed all taste for venison in many of his readers. The story of the hunt is given from the standpoint of the deer, and is, I think, the most beautiful and effective animal story yet written in this country. It is true in the real sense of the word. The line between fact and fiction is never crossed.

Neither does Mr. William Davenport Hulbert cross this line in his Forest Neighbors, wherein we have the life stories of the porcupine, the lynx, the beaver, the loon, the trout, made by a man who has known these creatures in the woods of northern Michigan from his boyhood. The sketches are sympathetically done, and the writer’s invention is called into play without the reader’s credulity ever being overtaxed. But in Mr. Thompson Seton’s Wild Animals I Have Known, and in the recent work of his awkward imitator, the Rev. William J. Long, I am bound to say that the line between fact and fiction is repeatedly crossed, and that a deliberate attempt is made to induce the reader to cross, too, and to work such a spell upon him that he shall not know that he has crossed and is in the land of make-believe. Mr. Thompson Seton says in capital letters that his stories are true, and it is this emphatic assertion that makes the judicious grieve. True as romance, true in their artistic effects, true in their power to entertain the young reader, they certainly are; but true as natural history they as certainly are not. Are we to believe that Mr. Thompson Seton, in his few years of roaming in the West, has penetrated farther into the secrets of animal life than all the observers who have gone before him ? There are no stories of animal intelligence and cunning on record, that I am aware of, that match his. Gilbert White, Charles St. John, Waterton, Wallace, Darwin, Jefferies, and others in England, — all expert students and observers ; Bates in South America, Audubon roaming the whole country, Thoreau in New England, John Muir in the mountains of California and in the wilds of Alaska have nothing to report that comes within gunshot of what appear to be Mr. Thompson Seton’s daily experiences. Such dogs, wolves, foxes, rabbits, mustangs, crows, as he has known, it is safe to say, no other person in the world has ever known. Fact and fiction are so deftly blended in his work that only a real woodsman can separate them. For instance, take his story of the fox. Every hunter knows that the fox, when pursued by the hound, will often resort to devices that look like cunning tricks to confuse and mislead the dog. How far these devices are the result of calculation we do not know, but hunters generally look upon them as such. Thus a fox hotly pursued will run through a flock of sheep. This dodge probably delays the hound a little, but it does not often enable the fox to shake him. Mr. Thompson Seton goes several better, and makes his fox jump upon the back of a sheep and ride several hundred yards. Of course no fox ever did that. Again, the fox will sometimes take to the railroad track, and walk upon the rail, doubtless with the vague notion of eluding his pursuers. Mr. Thompson Seton makes his fox so very foxy that he deliberately lures the hounds upon a long trestle where he knows they will be just in time to meet and be killed by a passing train, as they are. The presumption is that the fox had a watch and a time-table about his person. But such are the ways of romancers. The incident of the mother fox coming near the farmhouse at night to rescue her young, and, finding him held by a chain, digging a hole and burying the chain, thinking she had thus set him free, is very touching and pretty, and might well be true. It shows how limited the wit of the fox really is. But, finding herself unable to liberate her offspring, that she should then bring him poison is pushing the romantic to the absurd. In all the animal stories of Mr. Thompson Seton that I have read the same liberties are taken with facts. In his story of the rabbit, Raggylug, he says: “ Those who do not know the animals well may think I have humanized them, but those who have lived so near them as to know something of their ways and their minds will not think so.” This is the old trick of the romancer: he swears his tale is true, because he knows his reader wants this assurance; it makes the thing taste better. But those who know the animals are just the ones Mr. Thompson Seton cannot fool. Any country boy knows that the rabbit takes no account of barbed wire fences or of briers and brambles as a means of punishing the dog that is pursuing him. If these things were universal, it is possible that in the course of long generations rabbits might learn to interpose them between themselves and their enemies, — possible, but not probable.

Or take his story of the crow — Silver Spot; how truthful a picture is this ? how much of the real natural history of the crow is here ? According to my own observations of more than half a century, there is very little. In the first place, that these natural leaders among the fowls of the air ever appear I have no evidence. I have known crows almost as intimately as I have hens from my boyhood, and I have seen no evidence of it with them. For forty years I have seen crows in winter, in different parts of the country, passing to and fro between their rookeries and their feeding grounds, and I have never seen anything like leadership among them. They leave their roosting places at daybreak and disperse north and south or east and west to their feeding grounds, going in loose, straggling bands and silently, except in early spring and when they first leave their rookeries; and they return at night in the same way, flying low if it is stormy and windy, and high if it is calm, rising up or sheering off if they see a gunner or other suspicious object, but making no sound, uttering no signal notes. They all have eyes equally sharp and do not need to be warned. They are all on the alert. When feeding, they do post a sentry, and he caws when danger approaches, and takes to wing. They do not dart into a bush when pursued by a kingbird or a purple martin; they are not afraid of a hawk; they cannot count six, though such traditions exist (Silver Spot could count thirty!); they do not caw when you stand under them in winter to turn their course; they do not drill their young; they do not flock together in June; they cannot worry a fox into giving up half his dinner; they do not, so far as we know, have perpetual sentries ; they have no calls that, we can be sure, answer to our words, “ Mount, ” “ Bunch, ” “ Scatter, ” “ Descend, ” “ Form line,” “ Forage,” — on these and other points my observations differ radically from Mr. Thompson Seton’s.

Crows flock in September. Through the summer the different families keep pretty well together. You may see the old ones with their young foraging about the fields, the young often being fed by their parents. It may be permissible to say that the old are teaching the young how to forage; they are certainly setting them an example, as the mother hen or mother turkey is setting her brood an example when she leads them about the fields. The cat brings her kitten a mouse, but does she teach him how to deal with the mouse ? Does he need to be taught ?

From my boyhood I have seen that yearly meeting of the crows in September or October, on a high grassy hill or a wooded ridge. Apparently all the crows over a large area assemble at these times; you may see them coming, singly or in loose bands, from all directions to the rendezvous, till there are hundreds of them together. They make black an acre or two of ground. At intervals they all rise in the air, wheeling about, all cawing at once. Then to the ground again or to the treetops, as the case may be ; then, wheeling in the air, they send forth the voice of the multitude. What does it all mean ? Ask our romancers ; they can tell you, I cannot. It is the meeting of the clan after the scattering of the breeding season, and they seem to celebrate the event. The crow is gregarious, he is social, he seems to have a strong community feeling; he will act as sentinel for the safety of his fellows. I have never seen crows quarrel over their food, or act greedy. Indeed, I am half persuaded that in hard times in winter they willingly share their food with one another. Birds of prey will rend one another over their food; even buzzards will make some show of mauling one another with their wings; but I have yet to see anything of the kind with that gentle freebooter, the crow.

What their various calls mean, who shall tell? That lusty Caw-aw, cawaw that one hears in spring and summer, like the voice of authority or command, what does it mean? I never could find out. It is doubtless from the male. A crow will utter it while sitting alone on the fence in the pasture, as well as when flying through the air. The crow’s cry of alarm is easily distinguished ; all the other birds and wild creatures know it, and the hunter who is stalking his game is apt to swear when he hears it. I have heard two crows in the spring, seated on a limb close together, give utterance to very many curious, guttural, gurgling, ventriloquial sounds. What were they saying ? It was probably some form of the language of love.

One very cold winter’s morning after a fall of nearly two feet of snow, as I came out of my door, three crows were perched in an apple tree but a few rods away. One of them uttered a peculiar caw as they saw me, but they did not fly away. It was not the usual high-keyed note of alarm. It may have meant “Look out! ” yet it seemed to me like the asking of alms : “Here we are, three hungry neighbors of yours; give us food.” So I soon brought out the entrails and legs of a chicken, and placed them upon the snow. The crows very soon discovered what I had done, and with the usual suspicious lifting of the wings approached and devoured the food or carried it away. But there was not the least strife or dispute among them over the food. Indeed, each seemed ready to give precedence to the other. In fact, the crow is a courtly, fine-mannered bird. Yet suspicion is his dominant trait. Anything that looks like design puts him on his guard. He suspects a trap. A string stretched over and around a cornfield will often keep him away. His wit is not deep, but it is quick, and ever on the alert.

Since Mr. Thompson Seton took his reader into his confidence at all, why did he not warn him at the outset against asking any questions about the literal truth of his stories? Why did he not say that their groundwork was fact and their finish was fiction, and that if the reader find them entertaining, and that if they increase his love for, and his interest in, our wild neighbors, it were enough ?

It is always an artist’s privilege to heighten or deepen natural effects. He may paint us a more beautiful woman, or a more beautiful horse, or a more beautiful landscape, than we ever saw; we are not deceived even though he outdo nature. We know where we stand and where he stands ; we know that this is the power of art. But when he paints a portrait, or an actual scene, or event, we expect him to be true to the facts of the case. Again, he may add all the charm his style can impart to the subject, and we are not deceived; the picture is true, perhaps all the more true for the style. Mr. Thompson Seton’s stories are artistic and pleasing, but he insists upon it that they are true to the fact, and that this is the best way to write natural history. “I believe, ” he says in his preface, “that natural history has lost much by the vague general treatment that is so common. ” Hence he will make it specific and individual. Very good; but do not put upon our human credulity a greater burden than it can bear. His story of the pacing mustang is very clever and spirited, but the endurance of the horse is simply past belief. What would not one give for the real facts of the case; how interesting they would be, no matter how much they fell short of this highly colored account ! There should be nothing equivocal about sketches of this kind; even a child should know when the writer is giving him facts and when he is giving him fiction, as he does when Mr. Thompson Seton makes his animals talk; but in many of the narrations only a real woodsman can separate the true from the false. Mr. Thompson Seton constantly aims to convey the idea to his reader that the wild creatures drill and instruct their young, even punishing them at times for disobedience to orders. His imitator, the Rev. Mr. Long, quite outdoes him on this line, going so far as to call his last book the School of the Woods.

Mr. Long doubtless got the hint of his ridiculous book from Mr. Thompson Seton’s story of the crow, wherein he speaks of a certain old pine woods as the crows’ fortress and college: “Here they find security in numbers and in lofty yet sheltered perches, and here they begin their schooling and are taught all the secrets of success in crow life, and in crow life the least failure does not simply mean begin again. It means death.” Now the idea was a false one before Mr. Long appropriated it, and it has been pushed to such length that it becomes ridiculous. There is not a shadow of truth in it. It is simply one of Mr. Thompson Seton’s strokes of fancy. The crows do not train their young. They have no fortresses, or schools, or colleges, or examining boards, or diplomas, or medals of honor, or hospitals, or churches, or telephones, or postal deliveries, or anything of the sort. Indeed, the poorest backwoods hamlet has more of the appurtenances of civilization than the best organized crow or other wild animal community in the land!

Mr. Long deliberately states as possibly a new suggestion in the field of natural history “that animal education is like our own, and so depends chiefly upon teaching.” And again: “After many years of watching animals in their native haunts [and especially after reading Thompson Seton] I am convinced that instinct plays a much smaller part than we have supposed; that an animal’s success or failure in the ceaseless struggle for life depends, not upon instinct, but upon the kind of training which the animal receives from its mother.” This is indeed a new suggestion in the field of natural history. What a wonder that Darwin did not find it out, or the observers before and since his time. But the honor of the discovery belongs to our own day and land!

Now let us see if this statement will bear examination. Take the bird with its nest, for instance. The whole art of the nest builder is concealment, — both by position and by the material used,— blending its nest with and making it a part of its surroundings. This is the way to safety. Does the mother bird teach her young this art ? When does she do it, since the young do not build till they are a year old ? Does she give them an object lesson on their own nest, and do they remember it till the next season? See, too, how all the ground birds and the females of nearly all the tree birds are protected by their neutral and imitative coloring. Is this, too, a matter of education? Or take any of our wild animals. Is the cunning of the fox a matter of education? or of inheritance ? Is he taught in the school of the woods how to elude the hound, or how to carry a fat goose, or how to avoid a trap ? Here is a neighborhood where a fox-trap has not been put out in fifty years. Go and bait your fox for a week in winter and then set your trap with your best art, and see if he comes and puts his foot or his nose in it. You may finally catch him, but not till you have allayed his suspicions and fairly outwitted him. He knows a trap from the jump, and it is not school knowledge, but inherited knowledge.

On what does the safety of the hare depend ? On his speed, his sharp eyes and ears, and on his protective coloring; the deer likewise on its speed and on its acute senses; and so on through the list. Nature has instilled into them all the fear of their enemies and equipped them with different means in different degrees to escape them. Birds of prey have almost preternatural keenness of vision. Many of the four-footed creatures have equal sharpness of scent. A wild animal is a wild animal when it is born, and it fears man and its natural enemies as soon as its senses and its powers are developed. This fear, this wildness, can be largely eradicated from most of them, if we take them young enough, and it can be greatly increased by hunting them with guns and dogs. The gray squirrels in some of our city parks are as tame as cats. On the other hand, let a domestic cat rear its kittens in the woods, and they are at once wild animals. Wild geese are tame geese when hatched and reared by domestic geese, but when in the fall they hear the call of their migrating clan in the air above them, do they not know the language ? do they have to be taught to spread their wings and follow after ?

The question I am here arguing is too obvious and too well established to be considered in this serious manner, were it not that the popularity of Mr. Long’s books, with their mock natural history, is misleading the minds of many readers. No pleasure to the reader, no moral inculcated, can justify the dissemination of false notions of nature, or of anything else, and the writer who seeks to palm off his own silly inventions as real observations is bound sooner or later to come to grief.

There is a school of the woods, as I have said, just as much as there is a church of the woods, or a parliament of the woods, or a society of united charities of the woods, and no more; there is nothing in the dealings of animals with their young that in the remotest way suggests human instruction and discipline. The young of all the wild creatures do instinctively what their parents do and did. They do not have to be taught; they are taught by nature from the start. The bird sings at the proper age, and builds its nest, and takes its appropriate food, without any hint at all from its parents. The young ducks take to the water when hatched by a hen as readily as when hatched by a duck, and dive, and stalk insects, and wash themselves just as their mothers did. Young chickens and young turkeys understand the various calls and signals of their mothers the first time they hear or see them. At the mother’s alarm note they squat, at her call to food they come, on the first day as on the tenth. The habits of cleanliness of the nestlings are established from the first hour of their lives. When a bird comes to build its first nest and to rear its first brood, it knows how to proceed as well as it does years later, or as its parents did before it. The fox is afraid of a trap before he has had any experience with traps, and the hare thumps upon the ground at the sight of anything strange and unusual whether its mates be within hearing or not. It is true that the crows and the jays might be called the spies and informers of the woods, and that other creatures seem to understand the meaning of their cries, but who shall presume to say that they have been instructed in this vocation? Mr. Long would have us believe that the crows teach their young to fly. Does the rooster teach its young to crow, or the cock grouse teach the young males to drum ? No bird teaches its young to fly. They fly instinctively when their wings are strong enough. I have often thought that the parent birds sometimes withheld food for the purpose of inducing their young to leave the nest, perching near by with it in their beaks and calling impatiently. The common dove will undoubtedly push its fully fledged young off the dovecot to make them use their wings. At a certain age young birds and young mice and squirrels and rabbits will leave their nests when disturbed, whether their parents are within hearing or not. Young hawks and young crows will launch out boldly into the air when they see or feel you shinning up the tree that holds their nest. Fear is instinctive in the young of all creatures, even of turtles. Yet Mr. Long would persuade us that young birds and animals are strangers to this feeling till their parents have taught them what to fear. Every farm boy knows that when old Brindle hides her calf in the woods, and he is sent to look it up when it is only a few hours old, that it is “as wild as a deer,” as we say, and will charge him desperately with a loud agonized bleat. Had the old cow taught her young to be afraid of what she herself was not afraid ? So with the human kind. Does the mother teach her baby to be afraid of strangers ? When I was a small boy I remember being afraid of the first soaring hawk I had ever seen, and I ran and hid behind the fence.

What Mr. Long and Mr. Thompson Seton read as parental obedience is simply obedience to instinct, and of course in this direction alone safety lies, and there is no departure from it, as Mr. Long seeks to show in his story of What the Fawns must Know. The parents and the young are filled with the same impulse. Is it to be supposed that our white-footed mouse has taught her young to cling to her teats, when the plough throws out her nest, and thus be carried away by her? When did she drill them? Was it by word of command or by pinches and nudges ? Are we to believe that the partridge teaches her just hatched brood to squat motionless upon the ground, or to stick their heads under leaves at a signal from her when a man or a dog appears ? There they sit as if suddenly turned to stone while she blusters about and seeks to lead you away from the spot. Who taught her to try to play her confidence game upon you, to feign lameness, a broken wing, a broken leg, or utter paralysis ? her parents before her ? How interesting it would have been to have surprised them in their rehearsal! Nearly all the ground builders among our song birds try the same tactics when driven from their nests. When and how were they taught, and who was their teacher ? The other day a lady told me she thought she had heard a robin in the summer teaching its young to sing. But, I said, the young do not sing till the following year, and then only the males. If they are taught, why don’t the females sing? Is the singing school only for boys ? It was not so when I was a youth.

Eternal vigilance is the price of life among the birds and the lower animals, and then they probably seldom die in their beds, as we say. They are like the people of a city in a state of siege, or like an army moving through, or encamped in, an enemy’s country. They are surrounded by scalpers and sharpshooters; yea, their camp is invaded by them. Guns, traps, snares, nets, snakes, weasels, cats, foxes, hawks, bloodsuckers, bone crushers, — foes in the air, in the bush, in the grass, in the water; foes by day, foes by night, foes that stalk, that glide, that swoop; foes that go by sight, that go by scent, that waylay, that spring from ambush, — how can they escape the fearful and the tragic, from the moose in his power to the hare in her timidity; from the fox with his speed and cunning to the mouse that he hunts in its meadow burrow ? They cannot and they do not escape, and if Mr. Long had learned his lesson outside of his study, he might have found it out. Mr. Long often describes, with an extra show of exactness and particularity, incidents he has seen in the lives of the wood folk that no man ever saw or ever will see. He would make us believe that in the Northern woods (he does not name the spot) it is often difficult to frighten the moose out of your way; he says that they get in the way of your canoe in the water, or follow it threateningly, even though you fire your rifle to frighten them off; and that the bears are so tame that they stand in the path before you and dispute the right of way with you, but that if you look hard enough at them they may clamber up the rocks and look down upon you as you pass ! We know that even the musk ox in the Arctic barren lands, that has never seen or known man, is wary and hard to approach. Mr. Long’s book reads like that of a man who has really never been to the woods, but who sits in his study and cooks up these yarns from things he has read in Forest and Stream, or in other sporting journals. Of real observation there is hardly a vestige in his book; of deliberate trifling with natural history there is no end. He describes how on one occasion his attention was arrested by a curious sound among the bushes on the side of a hill. He could not make out what was coming. But let me give the passage entire as a good sample of the tales of this Münchausen of our nature-writers; “It was not a bear shaking down the ripe beechnuts — not heavy enough for that, yet too heavy for the feet of any prowler of the woods to make on his stealthy hunting. Pr-r-r-r-ush,swish ! thump! Something struck the stem of a bush heavily, and brought down a rustling shower of leaves; then out from under the low branches rolled something that I had never seen before, — a heavy grayish ball, as big as a half-bushel basket, so covered over with leaves that one could not tell what was inside. It was as if some one had covered a big kettle with glue and sent it rolling down the hill picking up dead leaves as it went. So the queer thing tumbled past my feet, purring, crackling, growing bigger and more ragged every moment as it gathered up more leaves, till it reached the bottom of a sharp pitch and lay still.

“I stole after it cautiously; suddenly it moved, unrolled itself. Then out of the ragged mass came a big porcupine. He shook himself, stretched, wabbled around a moment, as if his long roll had made him dizzy; then he meandered aimlessly along the foot of the ridge, his quills stuck full of dead leaves, looking big and strange enough to frighten anything that might meet him in the woods.” And presently we are told he did frighten a hare almost out of its wits. One would like to know what Mr. Long had for supper the night he dreamed this dream. He had probably just read or heard the old legend of the porcupine rolling over under an apple tree and walking off to his den with his quills stuck full of apples; this, with a late supper of Welsh “rabbit, ” had doubtless caused this fantastic vision to dance through his brain. But how did he come to believe it was a real experience ? that is the mystery. One doubts his ever having met a porcupine in the woods, or he would know that these creatures do not cover their noses with their tails; the tail is always extended flat upon the ground and used as a weapon of defense. He ought to know, too, if he had had any such experience as he describes, that when a lynx, or any other wild animal, attacks a porcupine and gets its mouth full of quills, it does not lie down beside its murderer and die, as he represents. It lives for days, maybe weeks, wandering through the forest.

Or take Mr. Long’s picture of the death — euthanasy — of an eagle, an occurrence which came under his own observation.

The eagle was circling in the air at a great altitude above the mountain top, and Sending forth the loud, strident eagle scream, — advising Jove, no doubt, that his bird was ready to come. Presently the wheeling and the screaming ceased, the great bird set its wings and came sailing with great speed straight toward the earth, passing near the observer, who saw with wonder that the head with partly closed eyes “drooped forward as if it were heavy.” “Only once did he veer slightly, to escape a tall stub that thrust its naked bulk above the woods athwart his path. Then with rigid wings he crossed the bay below the point! still slanting gently down to earth, and vanished silently into the drooping arms of the dark woods beyond, ” where Mr. Long soon found him, “his head lying across the moss-cushioned root of an old cedar, his wings outstretched among the cool green ferns — dead. ” Let us see how probable this event is : birds die as men do, suddenly, or from lingering disease and old age. We all know that when birds or poultry or caged eagles die of old age, or other causes, they sicken and droop for several days, refuse food, and refuse to use their wings, till some morning we find them dead under their perches. Sudden death with them is probably from apoplexy or something akin to it. I have heard of canaries suddenly falling dead from their perches, and of wild birds suddenly falling dead from great emotional excitement, when their nests were being robbed. It is possible that an old eagle might be smitten with apoplexy while high in air. In that case would he come sailing calmly to earth like a boy on a toboggan slide ? Would he not rather collapse and come down in a heap as men and birds do?

It is not unusual for one to see hawks and eagles come to the earth from a great altitude with wings set in the manner that Mr. Long describes (all except the drooping head and the halfclosed eyes) ; but who ever before fancied Death sitting astride their necks ? The tale goes very well with the other of Mr. Long’s, — of the playful porcupine rolling down the bank just for fun!

If it be urged that I discredit Mr. Long’s stories simply because I myself have never seen or known the like, I say, no; that is not the reason. I can believe many things I have never seen or known. I discredit them because they are so widely at variance with all we know of the wild creatures and their ways. I discredit them as I do any other glaring counterfeit, or any poor imitation of an original, or as I would discredit a story of my friend that was not in keeping with what I knew of his character. There are many, very many, things in our own natural history that I do not know; I add a little to my knowledge of it every year, and hope to keep on doing so as long as I live; but I do know that Mr. Long draws the long bow when he says he has seen the great blue heron break up a frog and scatter the fragments upon the water and then wait to spear the little fish that might be thus attracted; or when he describes so circumstantially, in one of his late magazine articles, how he had a peep into the kingfisher’s “kindergarten, ” and saw the old birds go fishing downstream and return with small minnows which they placed in a shallow pool near the main stream, and then went off and fetched their young to the spot and instructed them in diving for these shiners. If he had said that he saw the parent birds fishing with hook and line, or dragging a net of their own knitting, his statement would have been just as credible; or, his story of how he has seen the mother fishhawk train her young day after day to fish, even catching a fish for them and then dropping it back wounded into the water, and then encouraging them to try for it! Our historian urges that if the young were not thus initiated into fishing they would relapse into the “old hawk habit of hunting in the woods, which is much easier.” How does the Rev. Mr. Long know that they would go straight back to the “ old hawk habit ” ? I once reared a marsh hawk, taken from the nest long before it was fledged. As it grew up it certainly needed no instruction as to how to use its talons. It would practice upon a dry leaf or a fragment of bark, striking it with unerring aim.

Equally fictitious is Mr. Long’s account of what he calls the Roll Call of the Partridge — how, after the mother of the brood had been killed, he has seen a young male take her place and lead the flock, and, near nightfall, take up his stand upon a log and call till his mates came one by one and stood beside him to the number of nine. Still the leader called, — there should be two more, — the two that were in Mr. Long’s game-bag; and who does not know that a smart young partridge, fresh from the school of the woods, can count eleven ? Mr. Long saw him in the act of counting them. The family had at last become alarmed he asserts, and “huddled on the ground in a close group, all but the leader, who stood above them, counting them over and over, apparently, and anon sending his cry out into the darkening woods.”

Why should any one palm off such stuff on an unsuspecting public as veritable natural history ? When a man, writing or speaking of his own experience, says without qualification that he has seen a thing, we are expected to take him at his word. Mr. Long says his sketches were made in the woods with the subjects themselves living just outside his tent door; and that “they are all life studies, and include also some of the unusual life secrets of a score of animals and birds. ” We are not, therefore, to regard him as playing with natural history material for the amusement of his reader, or, like Mr, Thompson Seton, seeking to make up an artistic whole out of bits and fragments of the lives of the animals, gathered here and there, and heightened and intensified by a fertile fancy, but as an actual recorder of what he has seen and known. What the “life secrets ” are that he claims to have discovered, any competent reader can see. They are all the inventions of Mr. Long. Of the real secrets of wild life, I do not find a trace in his volume.

The only other book of Mr. Long’s I have looked into is his Beasts of the Field, and here he is for the most part the same false prophet that he is in the School of the Woods. His statements are rarely convincing; rarely do they have the verisimilitude of real observations. His air is that of a witness who is trying to mislead the jury. What discoveries he has made! Among others, that the red squirrel has cheek pockets in which he can carry half a dozen chestnuts at a time! Has he really never seen a red squirrel, or does he not know him from a chipmunk ? There is probably not a natural history museum in the land that would not pay a fine sum for a red squirrel with pouches in his cheeks.

What fun the fishermen and hunters and farmers must have with Mr. Long! Some fisherman along the coast told him that the fox catches crabs by trailing his brush over the water as a bait; the crab seizes it, whereupon the fox springs away and jerks the crab to land. Mr. Long hopes to confirm the observation some time!

An old fox hunter found him still more gullible. He told him how one morning he made the discovery that a fox was in his hencoop killing his chickens. Approaching cautiously he closed the opening and had the fox a prisoner. On entering the coop a few moments later, what was his surprise to find one dead pullet and a dead fox beside it. He concluded the thief had tumbled down from the roost and broken his neck. He laid both the fox and his victim on a box outside the door. A minute later both fox and pullet were gone! The fox was only “playing possum,” and when he left he took his chicken with him!

He knew of a black fox that played the same trick. A boy caught it in a trap, and found it in the morning apparently dead and frozen stiff. He carried it home in triumph over his shoulder. (Of course the fox had suppressed its animal heat also!) He removed the trap from the frozen leg, stroked and admired his beautiful prize, and then, as he turned his attention away for a moment, “he had a dazed vision of a flying black animal that seemed to perch an instant on the log fence and vanish among the spruces.” Could credulity any further go ?

It seems to me that Mr. Long’s story of how an old fox captures chickens roosting beyond his reach in a tree does go a little further. The fox simply runs around the tree, going faster and faster, “jumping and clacking his teeth,” and the chickens in trying to follow him with their eyes get dizzy and tumble off the roost! Mr. Long gives this as if it might have been his own observation, but doubtless some old farmer has “soaked ” him with it. How the old humorist must have chuckled in his sleeve! I have read of an owl in South Africa which the natives believe can be made to twist its head off by a person walking round and round it. The curious bird follows you with his eyes, till, presto ! his head is off. This story goes one or two better than that of our Natural History Münchausen!

John Burroughs.