300 Bibliographical Notices. 



disturbed security ; aud long may it contiuue to do so !" After these 

 remarks, follow eight pages on otter-hunting, appended to which are 

 four lines and a half of information on the natural history of the ani- 

 mal. We certainly think that, both here aud in other parts of the cata- 

 logue, a great deal of matter has been introduced which would have been 

 better kept out. Observations on otter-hunting would be suitable 

 enough for a sporting-journal, such as 'Bell's Life' or the 'Field,' 

 but they scarcely seem appropriate in a scientific catalogue of JNIam- 

 malia. Again, in noticing the Fox, our authors limit their natural- 

 history observations to saying that it is " abundant in both counties." 

 Then we have a paragraph on the philology of the word " tod," the 

 local term for the fox. Afterwards follows a page of information on 

 the packs of fox-hounds, and their owners and huntsm.en of the two 

 counties. We are told, for example, that " the Durham county pack 

 contains fifty-one couples ; they hunt four days a week, viz. Monday, 

 Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday; J. Henderson and J. Harvey, Esqs., 

 are the masters, Mark Carr the huntsman, aud Stephen Winkworth 

 the whip. The kennels are at Sedgefield aud Farewell Hall ;" alsothat 

 " the Alnwick pack is new, — we believe, also a ' scratch' or ' trencher- 

 fed ' pack." How all this comes under the head of Canis tmlpes we 

 are at a loss to tell. We should have thought that, if it had to be 

 included at all, Canis familiaris would have been the most suitable 

 heading ; with a little more discretion on the part of the authors 

 and editors, it would have been kept out altogether. 



Now that we are criticising — as criticism is usually understood — 

 we may further point out that certain species appear to be included 

 in the list on very slender grounds, and in some cases, indeed, on no 

 grounds at all. Passing over the first on the list. Homo sapiens, 

 whose presence there is amusing rather than objectionable, we come 

 to the Wolf (C(/?n'5 lupus), which does not seem to have existed in 

 Northumberland and Durham much later than the third Henry. A 

 little further on we meet with the Roe Deer, Red Deer, and Beaver, 

 all of them animals long extinct. It may be, perhaps, that these 

 species are rightly included in the list ; but that depends upon the 

 principle on which the catalogue has been constructed. If the au- 

 thors have comprehended all the mammals that have existed in the 

 district during the historical era, these species ought, of course, to be 

 included. This would be the principle the geologist would adopt ; 

 for he must have an era or period to work in. But the zoologist or 

 investigator of recent life deals with time more sparingly : his inves- 

 tigations, indeed, are almost limited to the present — to life in all its 

 various aspects, as he can now observe it. Hence it would perhaps 

 have been as well to have kept such species as those named apart 

 from those which exist in the district in the present day — in other 

 words, to have made their primary list one of species that compose 

 the existing mammalian fauna of the district, with a supplementary 

 list of such other species as are known to have formerly existed, but 

 which are now extinct ; for what we most want to learn from a 

 catalogue of this kind is not so much what the fauna of any part of 

 England was 300, 500, or 1000 years ago, but what it is now, anno 

 Domini 1864. 



