130 THE GROUSE 



When the work of the Committee is 

 fully made known it will be seen how 

 extensive, careful, penetrating, compre- 

 hensive, and laborious this has been. It 

 was necessary to organise plans of their 

 work, opportunities of making over a 

 widely extended area the needed field 

 observations, and means of procuring over 

 an equally wide field specimens of grouse 

 in health and disease, grouse food, and 

 other productions, without which no 

 useful progress could be made. 



It has been truly said by Dr. A. E. 

 Shipley, one of the experts on this in- 

 quiry, that in the study of grouse disease 

 " our starting-point should be the normal, 

 the healthy ; yet until lately no one has 

 studied the healthy grouse, and indeed it 

 is almost impossible to find a normal 

 grouse, i.e. one free from parasites. A 

 grouse cannot express to us its feelings ; 

 the state of its tongue, the rate of 

 its pulse, even its temperature tell us 

 nothing, because we have no norm and no 

 means of estimating the extent to which 



