THE FLATS 49 



It was good to leave this domestic pillar of salt and 

 see once more a grubby child sucking acid-drops in the 

 road ; to leave cheap reprints for first editions again ; and to 

 hear once more the cry of the lapwing and the humming of 

 the cushat, and to depart a coimty altogether whose record 

 is kill and stuff, stuff and kill from first page to last. 



But it is ill to leave this land of industrious Fleming 

 and free-hearted Northman with sour feelings. A change 

 is certainly at hand, and it is equivalent to the change 

 that is taking place among naturalists. Up to the 

 dawn of the twentieth century a naturalist was more 

 or less judged by the number of birds or manunals of 

 different species he could kill in a lifetime, and accordingly 

 Seebohm, totting up the number of titmice he had shot 

 in Siberia and Gatke, relating how he had " obtained " 

 sixty bluethroats in full plumage on a May morning, 

 were the Dioscuri of the ornithological Pantheon. But 

 the mortuary notion of excellence in Natural History 

 is now discredited, though as yet without seriously 

 checking the extermination of rare species by the predatory 

 naturalist. Progress there is, and one way of detecting 

 it is to observe the process among individual naturalists 

 in our own generation. Many naturalists (J. K. Job, 

 the American ornithologist, Mr. Edmund Selous and 

 Mr. Patterson of this same Norfolk, are distinguished 

 examples) have discarded the old, bad tradition, and 

 been converted from the gun to the field-glass. It is indeed 

 worthy of note that men like these, emerged from the 

 pupa stage of Natural History, rather than the professed 

 " humanitarian," attack the destroyers with the most 

 bitterness. Paul, after all, is the very best judge of what 

 Saul was. Therefore, there is a kind of savour in the 

 literary works of these " converts," a reality given 

 poignancy by occasional outbursts of heroic self-loathing, 

 absent from the writings of other naturalists, who, 

 nurtured in more civilized and philosophic ways, have 

 never known the temptation to use a gun or keep an 

 " aviary." It is pleasanter and truer, then, in leaving 

 Norfolk to think of Mr. Patterson and to reflect that 

 what has taken place in him with such lofty credit is 

 surely, if slowly, affecting his fine countrymen. 



4 



