

50 ANIMAL COLONISTS 



districts as stock. Other red deer are also about to 

 be imported, not from England, but from Australia, 

 these being of English stock ' once removed.' 



This is only a minor and recent instance of what we 

 may term the colonizing faculty of English animals. 

 They seem to share the physical, and in some degree 

 the mental, capacity of the British for ' getting on ' in 

 new countries, and to make more of their opportunities 

 than the indigenous creatures, without possessing such 

 marked advantages as their masters often have over the 

 human inhabitants. If a census could be taken of the 

 creatures of British descent making up the animal 

 population in the vast new territories peopled by men 

 of English blood, the world would contemplate with 

 astonishment the facts of this double migration and 

 dual increase of man and beast alike from two small 

 islands in the West Atlantic. Nor do our animal 

 colonists confine themselves to the new Anglo-Saxon 

 countries. Whatever unkindly criticisms are levelled 

 at the Englishman abroad, the English animals, 

 domesticated and wild, are everywhere welcome. The 

 sparrow and the rabbit are the two exceptions which 

 prove the rule ; but for almost every other British 

 animal, from Derby winners and pedigree shorthorns 

 to Norfolk pheasants and Loch Leven trout, the men 

 of the New World, the colonists of Great Britain, Spain, 

 Portugal, and even of Holland for the Boers are now 



