MARCH 



accounted for golden plover by the score, I never shot 

 but one peewit in my life, and my hands are clean from 

 the blood of the whaup. 



XVIII 



The mischief wrought by professional collectors working 

 for affluent amateurs is incalculable and very gaint KUda 

 difficult to check, especially that form of in- and her 

 dustry which ministers to the petty and ignorant Wren 

 vanity of possessing British specimens of rare animals, 

 eggs, and plants. Good naturalists are satisfied with the 

 knowledge that the osprey, for instance, still rears its 

 brood in two or three of its immemorial, and once 

 numerous, nesting stations in Scotland. His concern is, 

 not to plunder the eyrie, but to protect it from plunder. 

 An osprey's egg laid in a land where ospreys abound will 

 serve the purpose of his collection every whit as well as 

 one of the dozen eggs or so annually laid in the United 

 Kingdom. But the pseudo-naturalist the amateur col- 

 lector is a mere virtuoso, and is willing to pay many times 

 more for a British-laid egg than for a foreign one. Very 

 likely he could not name at sight more than a score or 

 two of the three hundred and odd species of British birds. 

 He is quite indifferent to the fate of a species; if it 

 becomes extinct, like the great awk, so much the keener 

 will be the envy of his rivals if he has secured a ' clutch ' 

 of its eggs before it disappeared. All his concern is to 

 fill up blanks hi his series, and his pursuit has as much 

 relation to true science as stamp-collecting, and no 

 more. 



Some bitter reflections against persons of this class and 



