59 o APPENDIX. 



never used you unkindly either by word or deed. You are a regius 

 professor, with above forty honorary titles after your name ; I am a 

 private individual, scarcely known, whose care it is through life never 

 to be the aggressor, but who will always resist to the utmost any attack 

 made upon him, come from what quarter it may. 



I gratefully attribute whatever knowledge I may possess to the 

 learned and inestimable Fathers of the Society of Jesus at Stonyhurst, 

 in Lancashire. I have travelled in far distant countries, to study 

 animated nature ; and many quadrupeds, many reptiles, and above 

 five thousand birds, have passed under my dissecting knife ; so that 

 I ought to know something of zoology : and, were I not fearful of 

 being thought vain, I would add, that I consider myself your superior 

 in that department of natural history. 



Should you honour me with a reply, I promise you that I will take 

 an immediate and dispassionate notice of it ; and I will address to 

 you a second, a third, and a fourth letter, and so on. As you have 

 first attacked me through Audubon, through him I will continue to 

 point my dart at you. It shall be in the following manner : I will 

 take passages from some of his faulty pages, and then comment upon 

 them : his bird of Washington, for example, in which I shall have to 

 remark on the drawing ; or the humming-bird, which he tells us can 

 fly in six days after it is hatched, &c., &c. This mode of carrying on 

 the warfare will answer well my ends. It will give me an opportunity 

 of again bringing on the stage certain individuals with whom I have 

 not yet quite squared up accounts ; and, at the same time, I trust 

 it will be to you a kind of cave ne titubes that is, a hint, a warning 

 lest you make another false step in your exertions to sound again 

 in the public ear, " O Candour ! whither art thou fled ? Certainly 

 not to Walton Hall." 



I have the honour to be, sir, your very obedient and humble 

 servant, CHARLES WATERTON. 



WALTON HALL, January 27, 1835. 



