238 THE ZOOLOGIST. 
’Tis here by night the Wild Cats prowl, 
‘Tis here the Badger hides : 
Here flits at eve the horned Owl, 
And Hobby fearless bides. 
“Tis here I’ve seen the Buzzard swoop, 
Where roams the tender brood; 
‘Tis hither Geese in legions troop 
From distant seas for food ; 
"Tis here the Wild Swan’s note is caught 
Soft on the frost-clear air, 
And here the Marten-cat has sought 
A last precarious lair.” 
When the Dane, discarding his piratical life, turned peaceful 
colonist, there arose on the wold slope many a lonely ‘ bye” 
between the forest land below and the rolling down above—downs 
quite unenclosed, and covered with a thin coat of ragged turf, 
interspersed with patches of yellow gorse or purple heather, or 
rough with the coarse tussocks of the barren brome grass. In 
these days the Marten must have been a very common denizen of 
our Lincolnshire woodlands, and -there can be no doubt that 
the few which remain are descendants of a very ancient race 
indigenous to the county long before Saxon or Dane, Roman or 
Coritani were heard of.+ Gone are the ancient pine forests, not 
a relic left; gone also are the great woodlands of beech and oak ; 
gone are the fenlands, beautiful after their kind in plant and 
animal life; gone the wide waste of the wold, the home of the 
Bustard and Stone Curlew; fen and wold alike now brought to 
the highest perfection of culture; and yet amid all these changes, 
and in spite of centuries of persecution, the little Marten-cat has 
succeeded in holding its own—a striking instance of the survival 
of some species under the most adverse circumstances. 
Recent notices of the Pine Marten i in Lincolnshire already put 
on record are as follows :— 
In ‘ The Naturalist,’ vol. v., 1855, Mr. John Brown, at that 
time taxidermist at Louth, states that on the 6th November, 
* There are cats in some of the great woodlands of Lincolnshire that have for 
generations bred wild. They are said to be much broader in the head and shorter 
in the tail than the domestic race from which they have sprung. 
+ To the Saxons the Marten was familiar as the Mearth, or Merth, to distinguish 
it from the Fiil-merth, Foumart, in contradistinction to which we find the form still 
known as the Sweetmart in the wilds of Cumberland, 
ie & te 
