rinded oaks they must have spent in
accumulating all this information, in addition to
what Adam observed as the great procession
of birds, beasts, and fishes passed to the baptism.
If Adam had written natural history, then we
should have known if we have yet classified half
the existing creatures, and have settled the question
of that troublesome sea-serpent who keeps
putting in alibis in different degrees of latitude,
and whose existence (you need not go and
mention it) I fervently and persistently have
believed in.

It is my fervent belief also—and I love
heterodoxy, because it keeps moving—that no one
can paint a thing which is not before him as he
paints; that no man can describe a place but on
the spot; that no one can write on animals till
he has chased, and shot, and petted, and watched
them. Natural history is not to be written by
professors in spectacles—timid, twittering,
unsophisticated men—from stuffed animals and
bleached skeletons. What we want is open air
natural history, such as Audubon, and White of
Selbourne, and Gould, and more of it and deeper
of it. What we want is gamekeepers' societies,
and discussions duly reported: Leatherstockings
president, Shotpouch corresponding secretary (if
he could only write)—no Monoculuses and
Moles, thank you. Then we might have something
like natural history, and know where we
were and what to be at. When fish are bred
and brought up in aquariums, and butterflies and
reptiles, too, then we shall know something about
them. Till then, under the head English
Natural History, write Chaos; which, being
interpreted, means blankness and old night. It is
the land of Boshen and of fog.

Let me turn to the word "fox," and see what
these dull, uuadvancing pedants say—men who
ought to discuss and chronicle every newspaper
paragraph relating to wild or tame foxes, and
examine the very length and breadth of their
subject.

What does Professor Mole say? Here is
the book, with a dauby, inaccurate, burnt sienna
drawing of a fox, that a whipper-in would laugh
at. The text occupies about two pages; it could
be read in five minutes, yet it was only last
November I had a burst of forty minutes after a
fox that broke away from the Blackmoor Vale
hounds, near Windwhistle Inn, and every
minute of that time, I can assure you, furnished
some fresh instance of this incomparable animal's
instinct. Riding home, the old whip told me
enough stories about the fox's habits to fill a
large volume of the Professor's works. And
this is history! Shall I be ever driven to
bring out that great exposure of mine, called
"The History of Historians?"

Well! let us get to Mole's book. Here
it is: Fox—vulpis vulgaris—supposed to be
indigenous to England—tradition says it was
taken over to America by the Pilgrim
Fathers—measures two feet five inches (I have
known some hundred exceptions); tail
cylindrical, one foot three inches; head broad,
snout sharp, eyes oblique, nose and forehead
rectilinear. On the colour of this little-known
animal the Professor is very minute, stating the
fur to be yellowish red, shading off to a paler
yellow (few naturalists can describe colours,
never using similes, the only way to express
clearly and vividly subtle distinctions); this
malt colour, or ripe corn colour, is mixed, it
appears, with grisly white and black hairs; ash
colour breaks out on the forehead, rump, and
hams; the lips, cheeks, and throat are white,
and there are white lines on the inner surface
of the legs; the breast and belly are whitish;
the ears and feet black; the tail is tipped with
white, and sometimes ringed with black. The
Welsh foxes, wishing for heraldic difference,
and being probably of old Pendagon blood, and
of a richer and stronger smell, leave out the
black ring.

The Professor having here exhausted his
limited palette of colours, branches off to the
Syrian fox, that Samson caught and tied
firebrands to, to the silver fox, &c. The Professor's
mode of writing, however, is sometimes rather
confused, for he describes an Indian fox that is
so agile that it can turn nine times within the
space of its own length—agility that even our
English M.P.s could scarcely rival. More
wonderful still, it feeds on "field mice and white
ants, with tails like squirrels." What a terrible
thing an ant with a squirrel's tail must be?

The great delusion of historians seems to be
that they must write about nothing but the
crimes of kings. The delusion of Professor
Moles seems to be that their special mission is
to describe in conventional language (generally
second-hand) the colours of animals. This done,
their task is over. Give me an old poacher;
you take Jardine. Give me Targett, you take
Mole. I believe in few things, but the one
thing I do believe in is the value of personal
observation. All second-hand things are bad;
second-hand information is generally first-hand
ignorance.

As for fish, I give up all hope of ever knowing
anything about them. The turtle, turbot, cod,
and sole I have dissected, and I think know
pretty well; but who is to spend months off the
Doggerbank, the Knock, or the Silver Pit sands,
to study the habits of the tabbied mackerel and
the pearl-coated whiting? who will go and live
in a diving-bell, and see them play and dance,
and feed and fight, and make love and go to
war?

But the fox. Is it not dreadful to a progressive
mind to hear that stagnant old Mole, surrounded
by his glass-cases and stuffed deaths,
potter on in this vein:

"Upper shades of the body red fulvous;
muzzle dark rufous; on the back waves of
whitish; chest grey; anterior line of the forelegs
deep black; tail mixed fulvous and black."

What is fulvous and rufous? Why, Mole,
do you not go to the colour seller and learn
the names of colours, for are not maroon
and burnt sienna more intelligible than your
gabble of fulvouses and rufouses? And
perhaps all this time, thou one-eyed writer for