146 



THE CABINET OF NATURAL HISTORY 



made subservient to the collection of a cabinet of zoology, 

 ichthyology, geology, mineralogy, &c. &c. Solomon him- 

 self did not behold the pleasures that distract mankind with 

 more contempt, when in his silly and well known fit of dis- 

 gust, he said, that " all was vanity." But draw out * * * *. 

 Ask him why acotyledonous stiped and culmiferous plants, 

 bivalve mollusci and chambered univalves were created be- 

 fore the depositions of the last of the argillite; or why the 

 acot}'ledonous and monocotyledonous plants before the 

 animals, and you shall hear him talk — "Good gods! how 

 he will talk!" as the mad poet makes one of his heroines 

 say of Alexander the Great. The enthusiasm of a geologi- 

 cal friend of mine, with whom I have the honour some- 

 times to correspond, and who in his last published work 

 sa3rs, that "the brilliant constellation of resplendent lumi- 

 naries," (alluding to certain persons whom he names, who 

 have written about stones and earth,) "who began at this 

 epoch to enlighten both subterranean hemispheres," is no- 

 thing to * * * * when thoroughly excited by his favourite 

 subject. I believe the greatest regret that * * * * ever ex- 

 perienced was, that he could not have lived during that re- 

 mote state of our globe, when animals of the Saurian family, 

 seventy feet long, (their necks thirty feet,) swam and 

 sported in the vast profound. He really sighs for the days 

 longpast of the megalosaurusand theplesiosaurus! "What," 

 said he to me one day, his eyes flashing at the thought, 

 "what a glorious time they must have had! Ah, there 

 can be nothing like it now!" And yet * * * * must think 

 that the world is rapidly growing better; for he says that 

 the inferior animals are all dying off as fast as they can; and 

 that the plastic hand of nature is occupied in preparing the 

 materiel for the formation of superior ones to occupy their 

 places; and he is as confident as of any thing at present before 

 his eyes, that the time will soon come, (by soon, I believe he 

 means only ten or twenty thousand years,) when every 

 thing inferior to man will have perished, and myriads of 

 genera, infinitely his superior, will have been created. For 

 my own part, I am far from being satisfied that this will be 

 a pleasant state for poor man to be in; fori remember when I 

 was a school-boy, I always objected to change from the 

 head of one class, and take my seat at the tail of the one next 

 above it. I would have made no objection to jump to the 

 middle of the form; but never liked the equivocal honour 

 of the single step. Burns appears to have been of the same 

 opinion of * * * *, and, like our naturalist, thought that na- 

 ture, having tried " her prentice hand," went on improving 

 her skill by practice. 



I wish I were enthusiastic; for I like enthusiastic people. 

 The sensation must at all times be delightful. How differ- 

 ently do different eyes behold the same object! An Eng- 

 lish traveller, in his journal, while descending the Missis- 

 sippi, says that the alligators looked like black logs on the 



water, drifting with the current; and that one day, he 

 took a canoe, and went off to kill one, fired at it, and when 

 he picked it up, found it to be a large bull-frog, weighing 

 nearly four pounds. What a bathos this is! I will say 

 nothing about Audebon's alligators — since his story of the 

 rattlesnake, I keep clear of Audebon; but how does one of 

 our own honest chroniclers and lovers of nature describe 

 the alligator? "Behold him rushing from the flags and 

 reeds. His enormous body swells. His plaited tail, bran- 

 dished on high, floats upon the lake. The waters, like a 

 cataract, descend from his opening jaws. Clouds of smoke 

 issue from his dilated nostrils. The earth trembles with 

 his thunder." This is something quite Ossianic; although 

 I must confess that I do not see how his tail could float on 

 the lake, while he was brandishing it on high. 



One man shall tell you, in homely phrase, that the In- 

 dian on horseback was very near getting a shot at a deer; 

 but that the deer ran off. Another person, properly im- 

 bued with the sublime and beautiful, in narrating the same 

 thing, says, " The red warrior, whose plumed head flashes 

 lightning, whoops in vain. His proud, ambitious horse 

 strains and pants; the earth glides from under his feet; his 

 flowing mane dances in the wind as he comes up, full of 

 vain hopes: but the bounding buck views his rapid ap- 

 proach, lifts aloft his antlered head, erects his white flag, 

 and his shrill whistle .says to his fleet and free associates, 

 ' Follow!' In a few minutes he distances his foe, turns about 

 and laughing says, ' How vain ! Go chase meteors in the 

 azure plains above, or hunt butterflies in the fields about 

 your towns.'" I will make no comparison between this 

 horse and that of the poet, whose speed devoured the 

 ground; nor between this laughing buck and the war-horse 

 which cried, ha! ha! — nor will I stop to notice the tauto- 

 logy of his lifting aloft his head, nor "the azure plains 

 above," which existed in his philosophy; but I will sav to 

 my acquaintance Cooper, as the above-mentioned buck, 

 or any other sensible animal might say, even without the 

 buck's peculiar and emphatic whistle. Do, for Heaven's 

 sake, my good fellow, banish the miserable Dr. Bat from 

 the prairie, and send him to hunt butterflies about vour 

 towns. 



But how I have wandered ! I began this with the inten- 

 tion of sending you for "The Cabinet," a drawing by a 

 young lady of your acquaintance, of the particular kind of 

 Trout found in Silver Lake, and, so far as I know, to be 

 found in Pennsylvania only in this and another lake, about 

 three miles from it. I believe this species has not been de- 

 scribed in any work on Ichthyology. It is not among the 

 sixty-two varieties of Salmo, described by Shaw. Le Sieur 

 knew it not. But as I think that the conductors of " The 

 Cabinet of Rural Sports" do not desire to load their work 

 with names in "heathen Greek," nor care about the differ- 



