DECEMBER 24, 1903 | 
NATURE 
177 
Even “the point of view,’? on which Mr. Long 
insists, does not very greatly vary. From book to book 
we come across the same animals, house-mouse and 
dormouse, sparrow and kingfisher, fox and squirrel, 
remarkable shells and strange leaf-insects. The 
problems are the samé—the boundaries of instinct and 
reason, the methods and reality of protective resem- 
blance, and all the general mystery of life. If Mr. 
Shepheard-Walwyn aims at inducing his readers ‘‘ to 
study for themselves wild nature and her wonderful 
ways,’’? Mr. Kearton makes the same appeal on his 
title-page. Mr. Walwyn gives his book an alternative 
title, ‘‘ The Battle of the Beasts,’’ his beasts proving 
in the sequel to be chiefly birds and insects. In like 
manner Mr. Douglas English chooses for one of his 
“wee tim’rous beasties’? the purple emperor, 
although among butterflies Apatura iris is not tiny, 
and in Mr. English’s own account of it is not 
timorous. He describes it as displaying while still a 
mere caterpillar ‘‘ paroxysms of fury,’’ and by help 
of its hard and formidable horns successfully repulsing 
the attacks of an ichneumon-fly. He leaves it to us in 
the end as a vision of triumphant beauty on its nuptial 
flight soaring boldly into the empyrean. 
The three authors above mentioned compete with one 
another in a very delightful manner, their illustrations 
being evidently the result of extreme ingenuity and 
Mr. 
skill in the art of photography. Kearton and 
Fic. 1.—Dormouse. (From ‘“‘ Wee Tim'rous Beasties.’’) 
others are now making known the devices, sometimes 
rather comical, by which the wary children of the 
wilderness have to be outwitted. It is not so easy to 
win the grace of naturalness in the portrait of a willing 
sitter. One can scarcely, therefore, expect a cool and 
unconstrained demeanour from creatures shy and 
nervous, surprised in their most secluded haunts, and 
expecting only that they and their young ones are to 
be robbed and murdered by the camera-fiend. That 
centaur-like compound of man and machine has in 
consequence to manage its movements with consum- 
mate caution and hours of patience. The plan of 
stretching a wire, by stepping on which the wild 
creature will itself open the magic shutter, is no doubt 
hopeful. But there are ledges of precipitous rocks, 
accessible only at serious risk of life or limb, to which 
it is as difficult to attach an electric wire as to put 
salt on the tail of a hunted bird. 
The unelaborate care with which nature moulds and 
paints her savages, the mild and the merciless alike, 
so as to make them undistinguishable from their | 
surroundings, has a singular effect on the pictorial 
success of a photograph. It might almost be said that 
the better it is the less we like it. The finish and 
excellence of the scene that is reproduced in all its | 
minutia often beguiles the eye to such an extent that 
it becomes nearly as great a puzzle to find the bird, the 
nest, the caterpillar or the butterfly, the spider and the 
No. 1782, VOL. 69] 
spider’s web in the picture as it was to detect the real 
objects in their actual environment of reeds and moss 
and grass, dead leaves and bare twigs, or a medley of 
sticks and stones. In this respect Mr. Long in his 
humorous and entertaining book has a certain advan- 
tage. With the help of a clever artist he can make 
his incidents highly dramatic. He can emphasise what 
points he pleases in the life and actions of his coons 
and cats, moose and mink, fat familiar toad or wood- 
cock with an astounding genius for surgery worthy 
of Hutton the bone-setter. 
All the writers seem to agree in lamenting ‘‘ That 
villainous saltpetre should be digg’d Out of the bowels 
of the harmless earth,’ to destroy their particular 
favourites, though they cannot help gloating over the 
hundreds of flies and other insects destroyed by toad or 
sparrow. But Mr. Long goes a step further in the 
cause of humanity. It is not only the ordinary gun of 
which he deprecates the use. The photographic gun 
must also be tabu. He celebrates the man “* who goes 
to the woods for rest and for letting his soul grow,” 
who is ‘‘ content just to see and hear and understand,’’” 
who “has no fret or sweat to get the sun just right 
and calculate his exact thirty-foot distance and then to 
fume and swear,’’ as Mr. Long has ‘‘ heard good men 
do’’ (though that, of course, is incredible and a mere 
aural delusion), ‘‘ because the game fidgets, or the 
clouds obscure the sun, or the plates are not quick 
enough, or,’’ &c. Thus do we scoff at other men’s 
pursuits, and at our own! Mr. Kerr in turn might 
well laugh to scorn Mr. Long with his canoe and his 
camp, and his creeping up “ through the brilée to 
where bear and her cubs are gathering blueberries 
in their greedy, funny way.’? What if they should 
suddenly take a fancy to gathering Mr. Long? 
Mr. Kerr says of his own excellent studies, 
‘“ wherever possible I have made my sketches direct 
from Nature,’’ with this ingenuous finish to the sen- 
tence, ‘‘ and for this purpose I have spent many hours 
in the Natural History Museum, Cromwell Road.’” 
There, to be sure, no living bears are likely to quicken 
the pulse or to make the directness of nature-study over 
exciting. But in compensation, as Mr. Kerr’s book 
will help its readers to perceive, our National Museum 
contains many of the most wonderful specimens that 
the globe produces, and though the game is dead and 
the life is still, they are trophies of all that is most 
artful and most artistic in nature’s handiwork. If, 
however, the illustration of the watering-pot shell is 
faithfully reproduced, the example copied cannot be a 
very good one, since it shows far too faintly the two 
rudimentary embedded valves to which attention is 
directed in the text. Protective resemblance is finely 
exemplified in Mr. Kerr’s figure and description of the 
leaf-butterfly, Kallima, from Mr. Rothschild’s museum 
at Tring, and again by several figures. of moths and 
butterflies in Mr. Walwyn’s ‘‘ Riddles.’? On the other 
hand, this much debated hynothesis is ill supported by 
the unnamed ‘submarine shellfish’? in the latter 
work. There a species of Pteroceras is represented, a 
moderately flattened shell with seven long projecting 
processes, and Mr. Walwyn asks us to believe that 
this ‘“‘ mimics a crab, whose coat of mail affords him 
a very complete protection.”” The author does not 
trouble himself to say what crab is mimicked, or 
whether its coat of mail is harder than that of the 
Pteroceras, or anything like as hard. He does not say 
whether he ever saw a crab with its legs sprawling 
about in such impossible positions as the processes of 
the shell would represent. Above all, he seems to have 
forgotten that to look like a crab is the worst possible 
disguise to assume in the sea, unless you wish to say 
to the first passer-by that has a wide enough mouth, 
“please, come and eat me.”’ 
