BRITISH SPOUTS AND PASTIMES. 509 



orders.* COCK, s. the male to a hen. CRAB, s. a shell-fish. CRACK, 

 s. the sound of anybody bursting or falling. EWE, s. the she sheep. r 

 FEMALE, s. li she. FISH, s. an animal that inhabits the water. 

 FISH-HOOK, s. a hook for catching fish. FRO<J, s. a small animal 

 with four feet, of the amphibious kind! the HOLLOW PART of a 

 horse's hoof." 



What a pretty fellow is this to get up a book of " Sports and 

 Pastimes of Great Britain !" He must be some cockney ass some 

 penny-a-line prodigy of the press, who has never even been to the 

 Epping hunt. Ignorant and brutal as they are, our fox-hunters are 

 certainly not so lamentably unenlightened as not to know what is 

 the meaning of a cow, a cock, or a fish-hook. They surely wanted 

 no ghost to tell them that crabs were shell-fish, and certainly not a 

 fat thick ghost, who estimates himself at five and twenty shillings a 

 copy ! But to sink the wind on this point ; what will sporting people 

 think of a wretch who, in a large work especially produced for their 

 edification, presumes to tell them that the frog is the hollow part of 

 a horse's hoof? He might just as well have said, the steeple is the 

 most striking feature of a church. So far from the frog being 

 the hollow part of a horse's hoof, every fool who has ever looked into 

 one knows that, with the exception of the outward horny wall, it is 

 the only part that projects. 



A man who undertakes to get up a book of grave pretensions on 

 the sports of this country, ought at least to possess some trifling 

 knowledge of natural history ; but our clever compiler is singularly 

 ludicrously ignorant of its most common terms. Every tolerably 

 well-informed man knows, that animated nature is artificially ar- 

 ranged, by scientific men, into classes ; that (sinking groups, tribes, 

 sections, families, &c.) each class consists of a number of orders ; 

 that these are respectively divided into genera each genus compre- 

 hending certain species. But at p. 217 of the present work, we are 

 told by the impudent blockhead who has manufactured it, that 

 " genus, in science, means A CLASS of beings, comprehending under 

 it many species ; as quadruped is a genus com prehending almost all 

 terrestrial beasts." The fool might just as well have said, that 

 ' ' county, in geography, means an empire, comprising a great number of 

 villages, as EUROFE is A COUNTY comprehending almost all parts of 

 the habitable globe." This, we solemnly assure such few, if there 

 be any, of our readers, as are unacquainted with the accidence of 

 natural history, is not, in the most trifling degree, more egregiously 

 absurd than the extracted definition of genus. Quadruped, it is pro- 

 per to add, is no more a genus than Europe a county. Indeed the 

 term is found in no system of arrangement whatever ; applicable as 

 it is to a vast number of animals, offering such broad differences as to 

 induce and warrant their separation, not only into an immense multi- 

 tude of genera, but also into classes. Were quadruped a genus, the 

 lion must of necessity be ranged with the lizard the chameleon 

 with the camel-leopard the toad with the tiger ! But our erudite 

 compiler goes still further ; for at p. 501, he states that a speties is a 

 CLASS ! ! Now, this is precisely tantamount to saying that No. 88, 

 Royal Exchange, is Great Britain. 



