III. 



TERRESTRIAL BRITISH QUADRUPEDS EXISTING IN A WILD 

 STATE AT THE PRESENT DAY. 



By T. Vattghan Roberts. 

 Bead at Watford, Wth December, 1891. 



Ox all occasions when it has been my privilege to listen to the 

 lectures delivered before this Society, the lecturers have been 

 gentlemen whose acquaintance with the subjects with which they 

 dealt was matter of common notoriety. This is not the case in the 

 present instance. My only claim (if it can be deemed one) for 

 presuming to speak on the subject of British quadrupeds, must be 

 based on the circumstance that I have always been a lover of 

 animals, fond of reading about them, and, so far as my limited 

 opportunities have allowed, an observer of their habits. Under 

 these circumstances I have felt considerable hesitation in venturing 

 to intrude on your attention, but I have been assured that the 

 absence of scientific knowledge on my part will probably be con- 

 doned by at any rate some of the members of the Society. I fear 

 that I can tell little which will be new to the majority of our 

 members, or which cannot be learned from well-known books 

 treating of the subject. 



The interest which is undoubtedly felt in our indigenous fauna 

 is, so far as the quach'upeds are concerned, to my mind somewhat 

 remarkable, and must certainly be regarded as to a large extent 

 sentimental. Some of our most conspicuous examples are rarely 

 seen by the ordinary observer. They are nocturnal in their habits, 

 and a man living in the country may easily spend his life without 

 ever coming across (say) a badger or an otter, and yet those 

 animals may be by no means rare in the locality in which he 

 resides. That an interest, however, is felt in them by very many, 

 and that regrets are often expressed at their possible extinction, 

 are facts with which we are all, I think, familiar. The feeling is 

 not confined to our own country. An Institution known as " The 

 National Zoological Park " has been established at Washington in 

 America, its most important object being to avert the threatened 

 extinction of the native American fauna, and the celebrated 

 Yellowstone Park in Wyoming is imder the care of the Institution. 

 This park, as it is tenned, is an immense tract of coimtry, 

 rectangular in form, and containing 3,312 square miles — over 

 2,000,000 acres. It is a perfect paradise for wild animals, the 

 area having been expressly reserved from settlement by the 

 Government, for their preservation. Among the animals which 

 find an asylum there, and which are assiduously protected, are the 

 elk, various kinds of deer, mountain sheep, the grizzly bear, and 

 (occasionally) the bison. The district abounds in rugged moun- 

 tain-chains unsurpassed in the United States for sublimity iuid 



