SUMMER AND WINTER. 383 



Brig and Strathtyruiu." We have met with not a few in our day 

 with a strange craze for using words and phrases of which they 

 evidently knew as little of the real meaning and proper application 

 as honest Geordie Braid with his terra firma. 



The new moon of the 5th, aided by a wind that at times almost 

 amounted to a gale, gave us along the western seaboard three very- 

 high tides in succession ; that of the afternoon of the 6th, however, 

 being the highest. The naturalist who is fairly diligent on such 

 occasions is pretty sure to meet with more or less interesting matter 

 for thoughtful study ; nor, so far as our own experience extends, 

 need the entries in one's note-book, even for what is called the 

 " dead " season of mid-winter, be fewer in number, or less interesting 

 or instructive than those of the pages devoted to the summer season 

 itself. "We have known naturalists whose note-books presented 

 little but a dreary succession of blank pages for the winter half- 

 year, and who thought it odd that we should be surprised at it. 

 It has been said that the laws of disease are as beautiful as those of 

 health, and that peace has its victories as well as war, and we have 

 no hesitation in saying that to the true naturalist the winter season, 

 if fairly and diligently encountered, is in its way just as interesting 

 as the summer, and that the observer who has all his wits about 

 him, and who goes to work with a will, may have his " victories " 

 even in the season of the winter solstice victories as important in 

 their way and gratifying as are those of midsummer itself, when 

 the days are at their longest, when summer seas are calm and 

 summer woods are green. In the course of half an hour's ramble 

 on the beach the other day, we fell in with some curious waifs, each of 

 which might be made the text of an interesting monograph. Three 

 drowned hedgehogs, for example, was a somewhat startling " find " 

 to turn up in a swathe of seaware that the advancing tide was slowly 

 rolling up the shingle. One was full-grown, a female ; the other 

 two, both males, were but half or three parts grown. "What 



