32 -WILD SCENES AND 'WILD HUNTEES. 



mens." Wtile he, with the experience of a boyhood and 

 manhood spent in hunting and among hunters, can subject 

 the wild legends and the vague tales he may hear to a sure 

 test within himself, and skilfully sift them of whatever truth 

 they may contain, for his own use — the Europeans, whose 

 years have been spent amidst the musty folios of a library, 

 or the faded specimens of museums, must take whatever they 

 may hear for granted — since it would puzzle a quizzing 

 "native" to romance more sillily than the venerated dullards 

 of those folios, and it would equally puzzle their astuteness 

 to recognize the living animals when they had only seen the 

 dried skins thereof! The consequence has been, that the 

 efforts of Europeans in Ornithology and Mammalogy have 

 been comparatively "lame and impotent conclusions," espe- 

 cially when they have undertaken to delineate American birds 

 and animals. As laborious systematizers and technicalists, 

 they of course have preceded and far surpassed us. We will 

 not dispute the husks of honor with them — but must insist 

 that as to all wherein consists the proper vitality and purpose 

 of such themes, our own — ^the American — treatment has been 

 the most original, vigorous and true. 



To such causes as we have traced, the fact is owing that in 

 Em'opean treatment, the subject of Natural History has been 

 technicalised into what may be almost called a perfect whalebone 

 state of sapless system. The subject, of all others possessing 

 the greatest amount of inherent vitality, it has been so heavily 

 overlaid by the dry bones of the Linnsean nomenclature as to 

 have become a veritable Golgotha of Science. Among us the 

 people, with whom it is necessarily a favorite theme, are 

 repulsed, in dismay of its formidable hieroglyphics, from what 

 is to them as a sealed book. Thrown back upon individual 

 resources solely, they become as we have seen, of necessity, 

 close observers, and so far as opportunity goes, much better 

 naturalists than your pur-blind Professors of the Science, who 

 see only a learned name in its proper "class" and "order," 



