140 JOURNAL, BOMBAY NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY, Vol. VIII. 
' Reason why.—The “Did ye do it” is of all shore fowls the 
fussiest, and most given to informing every one of the ill-intentions 
of every one else. May his father be roasted ; he has saved many 
a duck from the shot gun, and many a crocodile from the rifle. 
The sandpipers, on the other hand, are as modest in demeanour 
as in plumage, much given to minding their own affairs, and so 
little suspicious as to be too often converted into snipes upon the 
unlearned shikari’s gamestick, We have seen them in dozens at 
the Tanna Railway Station on a Sunday evening, and sorrowed for 
them. 
Mr. Kipling’s birds are followed by his monkeys, whereof he has 
many good yarns. One is, that some Hindu evolutionists suppose the 
English to be descended of Hanuman, or, as we call him in Western 
India, Maruti (the monkey-god). All the ingenuity of the West can 
invent no theory that is without parallel in Asiatic parable or paradox. 
It is true that all Europe once believed that Englishmen had tails, and 
Colonel Yule quotes authority to show that the King of Cyprus mor- 
tally offended Richard Cceur de Lion by an offensive allusion to the 
hero’s tail, which was then lashed to the effect of lashing the 
impertinent princeling out of his island, and Richard made a Christ- 
mas-box of it to a friend in right-royal fashion. The mythology of 
the * missing link” would make a big book, and cannot be allowed more 
of our limited space. The chapter has one or two delightful illustra~ 
tions that should be korrowed (with permission) by the man who writes 
that big book. Mr. Kipling passes on to asses, but we have lately dealt 
at length in these columns with the Zquide over the signature, alas ! 
of a vanished hand. Nor need we linger here over his two chapters of 
““oves and boves,” except to notice the last paragraph of the cow Sura, 
which relates how M. de Buffon got his name for Bos indicus, “ Zebu” 
from a travelling showman. Mr. Kipling thinks “this fragment of a 
French showman’s bonnement” to be indelibly branded on the poor 
“bile ; but the truth is, that the word is fast passing out of anything 
like zoology, and will probably soon disappear even from “ popular 
science.” 
It is very characteristic of our author that he excludes buffaloes from 
the company of respectable Bovde to chum them upon pigs, of which 
latter he justly remarks that “there is nothing to be ashamed of in the 
