NATURE 



177 



THURSDAY, JUNE 20, 1901. 



CHARLES ST. JOHN. 

 Charles St. John's Note Books, 1846 — 1853, Invererne, 



Nairn, Elgin. Edited by Admiral H. C. St. John. 



Pp. 119. (Edinburgh: D. Douglas, 1901.) Price 



js. 61I. net. 

 '"PO many an elderly man, among whose most cherished 

 possessions in bygone days was a well-thumbed 

 copy of " Wild Sports in the Highlands '' and who now 

 from "life's passionless stage" looks fondly back on the 

 imaginations of youth, "St. John" is still a magic 

 name, awakening, like Campbell's wild flowers, forgotten 

 afifections. It brings with it a whiff of the smell of fresh 

 trout frizzling in the mountain sheiling, blue with peat 

 smoke, and calls up visions of misty moors and tumbling 

 rivers, of "muckle harts," wild cats and martens, and 



" Sweet little islands twice seen in their lakes," 

 gardens of the Hesperides of boyish dreams. 



The sportsman-naturalist was a great-great-nephew of 

 the namesake to whom Pope dedicated his " Essay on 

 Man," the first Lord Bolingbroke, and began life as a clerk 

 in the Treasury. .\ single legend only relating to him 

 survives in Whitehall. A warrant of some importance 

 was wanted, and St. John's chief, remembering that not 

 long before it had been given to him to copy, asked him 

 for it. 



The warrant was not forthcoming, and St. John, 

 pressed to find it, with a slight stutter, not impossibly 

 increased by a little nervousness, apologised : " I put it 

 into the fire because it b-b-bored me." 



The story may be mythical. But as, according to his 

 own account, he " gave notice to quit to prevent a reversal 

 of the process," it is perhaps not uncharitable to assume 

 that he was one of His Majesty's mdifferent bargains. 



On leaving the Treasury he retired to a shooting pro- 

 perty in the north of Scotland, lent him by a cousin, and 

 shortly afterwards married a Scotch lady blessed with 

 enough of this world's goods to enable him to enjoy to 

 the full a life of busy idleness among red deer and 

 salmon. 



It was to a chance acquaintance with Mr. Cosmo 

 Innes, then Sheriff of Moray, and an occasional con- 

 tributor to the Quarterly Review, that three generations 

 of boys are mainly indebted for " Natural History and 

 Sport in Moray " and the yet more fascinating " Wild 

 Sports," which has run through at least seven editions. 

 Mr. Innes was spending an autumn holiday on a property 

 adjoining the shooting over which St. John was privi- 

 leged to wander with rod and gun. He had wounded a 

 brace of partridges and had followed them from the 

 island in the Findhorn where he found them to a turnip 

 field on the opposite bank, and was looking for them 

 when " a tall, gentlemanly man " with a poodle " with a 

 Mephistopheles face," got over the fence and offered to 

 find the birds which he had marked down. 



Mr. Innes called in his pointers and the poodle, " with 

 a series of curious jumps on all fours and pauses between 

 to listen," made short work of the birds— and with this 

 introduction a close friendship sprang up between the 

 two men. 



NO. 165 I, VOL. 64] 



It was a few years later, when a day's cover shooting 

 had been spoilt by a Highland downpour, and St. John, 

 wrapped in a coat of sealskin of his own killing, had 

 whiled away a long wet drive home with stories of sport 

 and of the ways of birds and beasts he had watched, that 

 Mr. Innes first suggested the idea that he should publish 

 his e.xperiences. 



St. John was modest, and at first scouted the notion 

 that he could write anything worth printing, but he men- 

 tioned " some old journals " which might, if ever the 

 attempt were made, be useful. 



The book named above contains these journals, which 

 are now published for the first time in the form in which 

 they were originally written, by the writer's son, Admiral 

 St. John. 



The cream of the notes was skimmed long ago for the 

 two books which established St. John's fame, and though 

 well worth printing, their chief interest, for those at least 

 who are familiar with them, now lies, perhaps, in the light 

 thrown on the secret of the fascination which — in spite of 

 the amiable egotism which is apt at times to jar a little— 

 those books possess. 



Like White of Selborne and, on a broader canvas, 

 Shakespeare, St. John drew direct from nature. 



From a hundred pages, in almost every one of which 

 are te.\ts from which a naturalist might preach a sermon, 

 it is not easy to make selections. But one or two little 

 touches, taken almost at random, are enough to illustrate 

 the breezy freshness of his notes. 



"The tracks (of otters) which we see," he writes, "are 

 almost invariably going up the river, showing that the 

 animal keeps the course of the stream in her downward 

 course ; but, on coming up, frequently leaves the water to 

 go a few yards along the bank." 



Fine swimmer as she is the otter is not a salmon, 

 above all such considerations as up stream and down 

 stream. Again, at the same opening (p. 82), 



" The bill of the oyster catcher (unlike the highly 

 sensitive bills of ducks, woodcock and curlews, which 

 patter or bore in the mud for small worms, &c., described 

 a few lines earlier) is as hard as ivory at the tip, the 

 bird using it more for breaking open shell-fish than for 

 digging in the mud." 



To give only two more quotations (pp. 74 and 86), 



"Wild cats are brindled grey, and I have observed 

 that domestic cats of that colour are more inclined to take 

 to the woods and hunt for themselves than others." 



" It blew a hurricane to-day from the W.N.W., with 

 cold showers. ... 1 saw a seagull caught by the wind in 

 the air and turned over five or six times before it could 

 recover its balance and get its head to w-indward." 



Admiral St. John, before publishing his father's notes, 

 visited again the scenes of his childhood, and has recorded 

 his impressions in a short preface, " Moray Revisited." 



Here, too, as everywhere else in the book, is food for 

 thought for a naturalist. 



Stone walls had given place to wire fences ; but just 

 where si.\ and thirty years before, in 1851, he had found 

 the nest of a "shoveller," a bird "not common in the 

 locality," a shoveller with a brood of five " swam out of the 

 tall rushes into the open water " as he walked down the 

 river. What is the secret of the lasting attraction of certain 

 particular spots for certain birds ? The little brown-headed 

 gulls crowd their nests, very inconveniently close together 



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