176 Fish Stories 



John Muir's incomparable biography of the water ouzel, 

 as he knew it in Ouzel Basin, on the north flank of Mount 

 Brewer. A genuine animal story is Irving's sketch of the 

 bobolink. A bobolink himself could not have done it better. 

 Flashes of the same method are seen in Thoreau's sketches 

 of squirrel and bird and ant, of oak tree and minnow in the 

 brook. These and their kind are as perfect as Corot's land- 

 scapes, and as difficult of imitation. 



In the other kind of legitimate animal stories, the author's 

 imagination occupies the center of the field. The animals 

 can talk, or sing, or dance, or tell fortunes, or play cards, 

 and nobody is deceived. When we learn from Joel Chan- 

 dler Harris how the rabbit lost his long bushy tail, we know 

 that the author is not rigidly adherent to the principles of 

 tail evolution. When we are told by Rudyard Kipling how 

 the kangaroo acquired his long hind legs through the thirst 

 for popularity and the dingo dog, we do not care even if a 

 geologist shows us that the kangaroo was in Australia, legs 

 and all, a thousand centuries before dingo dogs or any other 

 dogs had been imagined. These are the '* just so" stories, 

 the " good fun " stories, the tales which represent the grad- 

 ual evolution into supernatural cleverness of the ancient 

 Mother Goose. 



But there is another kind of animal story — the story that 

 will sell, the story that is half sentimentalism and the other 

 half lying. And this is the sort that leads Theodore Roose- 

 velt, naturalist and sportsman, to forget the existence of 

 another Roosevelt, statesman and party leader, and to 

 brandish in zoology the big stick that is his, through inter- 

 national politics. 



It wouldn't matter much if this stuff were for the con- 

 sumption of hammock-swinging novel readers. The thin 

 flow of drivel which passes through their minds is im- 

 proved by any suggestion of realities. But to use this stuff 

 in the schools, that is the pity. There is enough ignorance 

 stalking abroad without filling with it the storehouses of the 



