LETTERS TO DR. GUNTHER 97 



To the same. 



'Lilford, November 24, 1872. 



'I was glad to secure Gray's collection of 

 Plates, and consider that I did not give an 

 extravagant price for it, but I should have 

 preferred that it should go to the British 

 Museum Library, and particularly asked the 

 auctioneer and Taylor to try to find out if the 

 Museum intended to bid for it, as in that case I 

 would not have opposed them. About the Spanish 

 Lynx, my experience of it is that it is by no 

 means a mountain-haunting species, though it 

 does occasionally frequent hilly country, but the 

 Goto de Dona Ana, and the Goto del Eey are 

 low sandy wastes, overgrown with evergreen, 

 scrub, rosemary, cistus, and dense masses of 

 briars with pines and cork trees, and swamps 

 here and there. And these are its favourite 

 haunts. My little Long-eared Bat is still well, 

 but has become very torpid and does not eat more 

 than two or three times a week. We have still 

 an abundance of flies in the windows. ... I 

 have a tin pot full of bats from Genoa, besides 

 two bottles of reptiles, bats, birds, &c., from 



