IN THE SHETLANDS 145 
upon as the most harmfully destructive animal on 
this earth, and the more scientific the more destructive 
he is. The other kind wearies, or may weary, but 
he never does. His whole life, in thought or act, is 
one long ceaseless crime against every other life. 
His goal is extermination, and nature, for him, a 
museum. He is the most disgusting figure, in my 
estimation, that has ever appeared in the world, nor 
is there any thought more painful to me than that 
of the slaughter he is every day perpetrating, and the 
extermination of species resulting from it. What 
deaths may he not achieve in a lifetime! Of all 
Thugs, he has the biggest record. That he is often 
an agreeable, intelligent, and cultivated man—a very 
good fellow and otherwise unoffending member of 
society—is infinitely to be regretted. I would he 
were a street nuisance, a swindler, tsar or grand duke, 
to the boot of his much greater enormities, for then 
he might be put down, whereas now there is little 
chance of it. 
Thank heaven he is not here, to put all these pretty 
little families under glass cases, and steal every egg 
on the ness. To get a thing dead, that is what his 
love of nature amounts to, and he does it for those 
like himself. I know the kind of people who enjoy 
those groups in the museum at South Kensington, 
and I am sick at heart that they should be there for 
them. Who is there, with a soul in his body, who 
can see a lot of young stuffed herons, say, in a nest 
with their parents, without feeling more disgust at 
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