CHAPTER VIII 

 CHARLES WATERTON 



IN these days, when the rich diversity of human 

 kind is the unpardonable sin against the Holy 

 State and the drains of thought are always in order, 

 I turn to one of our old naturalists with a pleasing sense 

 of profanity. 



" If you dissect a vulture that has just been feeding 

 ■on carrion, you must expect that your olfactory nerves 

 will be somewhat offended with the rank effluvia from 

 liis craw, just as you would be were you to dissect a 

 citizen after the Lord Mayor's dinner." Yet the man 

 who could give so imaginative a twist to the study of 

 Natural History is neglected ! Charles Waterton was 

 a Yorkshire squire, the owner of a large estate (Walton 

 Hall) near Wakefield, where he had a bird-sanctuary, 

 stocked with many an ornithological rarity. Just after 

 I had been reading Waterton I happened to take up 

 Wallace's account of a voyage up the Rio Negro, a 

 tributary of the Amazons. In one portion he describes 

 how he organized an entire village to slay the orange 

 " cock of the rock " for a fortnight. The Amazon 

 forests, says Wallace, are more silent and empty of hfe 

 than the Sahara. One sometimes wonders, as one gazes 

 in rapture upon the triumphs of scientific destruction, 

 ■whether in some magnificent future age it will not (as 

 it approaches the sources of energy) discard machinery 

 altogether and invent a race of men who, by the simple 

 process of a pestilential vapour from their mouths, will 

 he enabled to wither and destroy every living thing 

 within a radius of a dozen leagues. Unconquerable race, 

 I prophesy thee in a transport of Utopian zeal ! So 

 that the verdict of the museum as to old Waterton's 

 eccentricity (partly no doubt because he would not have 



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