300 Bibliographical Notices. 
disturbed security ; and long may it continue to do so!” After these 
remarks, follow eight pages on otter-hunting, appended to which are 
four lines and a half of information on the natural history of the ani- 
mal. We certainly think that, both here and in other parts of the cata- 
logue, agreat deal of matter has been introduced which would have been 
better kept out. Observations on otter-huntimg would be suitable 
enough for a sporting-journal, such as ‘ Bell’s fines or the ‘ Field,’ 
but they scarcely seem appropriate in a scientific catalogue of Mam- 
malia. Again, in noticmg the Fox, our authors limit Whee natural. 
history observations to saying that it is “‘ abundant in both counties.’ 
Then we have a paragraph on the philology of the word “tod,” the 
local term for the fox. Afterwards follows a page of information on 
the packs of fox-hounds, and their owners and huntsmen of the two 
counties. We are told, for example, that “the Durham county pack 
contains fifty-one couples ; they hunt four days a week, viz. Monday, 
Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; J. Henderson and J. Harvey, Esqs., 
are the masters, Mark Carr the huntsman, and Stephen Winkworth 
the whip. The kennels are at Sedgefield and Farewell Hall;” alsothat 
“the Alnwick pack is new,—we believe, also a ‘ scratch’ or ‘ trencher- 
fed’ pack.’ How all this comes under the head of Canis vulpes we 
are at a loss to tell. We should have thought that, if it had to be 
included at all, Canis familiaris would have been the most suitable 
heading ; with a little more discretion on the part of the authors 
and editors, it would have been kept out altogether. 
Now that we are criticising—as criticism is usually understood— 
we may further point out that certain species appear to be included 
in the list on very slender grounds, and in some eases, indeed, on no 
grounds at all. Passing over the first on the list, Homo sapiens, 
whose presence there is amusing rather than objectionable, we come 
to the Wolf (Canis lupus), which does not seem to have existed in 
Northumberland and Durham much later than the third Henry. A 
little further on we meet with the Roe Deer, Red Deer, and Beaver, 
all of them animals long extinct. It may be, perhaps, that these 
species are rightly included in the list; but that depends upon the 
principle on which the catalogue has been constructed. If the au- 
thors have comprehended all the mammals that have existed in the 
district during the historical era, these species ought, of course, to be 
included. This would be the principle the geologist would adept ; 
for he must have an era or period to work in. But the zoologist or 
investigator of recent life deals with time more sparingly: his inves- 
tigations, indeed, are almost limited to the present—to life in all its 
various aspects, as he can now observe it. Hence it would perhaps 
have been as well to have kept such species as those named apart 
from those which exist in the district in the present day—in other 
words, to have made their primary list one of species that compose 
the existing mammalian fauna of the district, with a supplementary 
list of such other species as are known to ee formerly existed, but 
which are now extinct; for what we most want to learn from a 
catalogue of this kind is not so much what the fauna of any part of 
England was 300, 500, or 1000 years ago, but what it is now, anno 
Domini 1864. 
