82 WILD SCENES AND WILD HUNTERS. 
mens.” While 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 
European 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 Linnzean 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,” 
