THE STRUGGLE FOR EXISTENCE. 209 



Mark Twain, in his Innocents at Hqme, assures us of 

 the peaceful life of a most incongruous happy family in 

 th South Seas : " Schools of whales grew so tame that 

 day after day they played about the ship among the 

 porpoises and the sharks without the least apparent fear 

 of us, and we pelted them with empty bottles." Of 

 course we are never quite sure, though he seems serious 

 here, that Mr. Mark is not at his fun as usual. Here is 

 a picture from Bret Harte, however, which, though also 

 in a work of fiction, must still be regarded as founding 

 in fact : " It was very quiet and kam ; there was squirrels 

 over the roof, yellow-jackets and bees dronin' away, and 

 kinder sleeping-like all round in the air, and jay-birds 

 twitterin' in the shingles, and they never minded me." 

 Mr. Hiram M'Kinstry was surprised into this look at 

 nature ; and we too, of a summer day, may allow ourselves 

 to look and see some such scene for ourselves. M. Jules 

 Verne, as we know, deals in fiction that can only be called 

 altogether enormous ; nevertheless, as we know also, the 

 data by which he gives consistence to his fiction, are 

 usually even mathematically true ; we may, on the whole, 

 rely on this picture of his : " Grazed herds of red ante- 

 lopes, zebras, and buffaloes a white rhinoceros crossed 

 the open an onager was braying, and a troop of monkeys 

 were chasing each other among the trees it was not so 

 much the number, as the wonderful variety of the animals 

 that surprised it seemed like a diagram in which the 

 painter had depicted each principal type of the animal 

 kingdom all that, in the virgin country where the wild 

 beast was still the undisputed master of the soil, lived 

 on in happiness, without a suspicion of danger." 



There is an article in the July number of Temple Bar 



for 1889 descriptive of the immense variety of birds 



that may come to a pond to drink : chaffinches, flycatchers, 



jackdaws, starlings, titmice, nuthatches, redstarts, thrushes, 



14 



