XXV111 PROCEEDINGS. 



natural history subjects " My worthy master in ornithology/' 

 he calls him, as he quotes from the well-known book which I own 

 took my own fancy immensely when, as a boy, I first read in its 

 pages the wonders of the South American forest. In those untra- 

 velled times there was no library without it. On Downs's return 

 from Europe, which he visited in 1864, being given a free passage 

 in H. M. S. Mersey, and taking over many cases of birds as well as a 

 stuffed moose, I went to see him, to hear him recount his adven- 

 tures. At that time I lived with my family on the shores of the 

 Arm and was a near neighbour. He had received many attentions 

 from savants and had been a guest of Waterton. He spoke of Water- 

 ton's tenderness of feeling towards all created things, especially the 

 feathered tribes ; how he would allow no guns to be fired by sports- 

 men or others on his estate, how the wild birds all seemed to 

 understand him, and what a motley gathering there was in the 

 groves and shrubberies of the park at Walton Hall ; how he would 

 inveigh against the superficial arid absurd natural history as often 

 published in his days both in England and the United States, even 

 Wilson and Audubon coming under the lash of his criticism. " You 

 should hear him," said Downs, " talk of the Hanoverian rat, the 

 only dumb creature I really believe which he really hated." 

 Waterton being of an old English Koman Catholic family which 

 had held Walton Hall for centuries, had no good word for the 

 Hanoverian dynasty, and averred that he had evidence to prove 

 that the grey rat was part of the freight of the vessel that brought 

 over Dutch William. Anyhow, Walton Hall, besides having 

 some of Cromwell's musket balls lodged in the old wood of the 

 house porch, was more than ordinarily troubled by the grey rats, 

 the deadly foes and exterminators of the old English black rat, 

 both in Europe and America, which latter country it very soon 

 reached. I remember a specimen of the black rat being shown at 

 one of our Institute's meetings at Halifax, which had just been 

 killed in Water Street. It was then stated that up to about a 

 century ago it was the common vermin of both countries. In New 

 Zealand, too, the European grey has destroyed the native black rat, 

 once the sole animal food of the Maori, being the only indigenous 

 quadruped of the islands. 



