BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 31 
our animals, than whole fleets of navigators and scientifi¢ 
pedants in silk stockings, could attain to in half a century. 
It is only those who have dared to live such lives as they 
did, and through familiar associations with them, have been 
enabled to unite scientific accuracy with the gleanings of their 
rude lore, who are to be depended upon as true delineators. 
Such men have our great naturalists been. Such men were 
Wilson, Godman and Audubon. With the eye, step, and 
frame of an Indian—the astuteness, nerve and intrepid skill 
of the pioneer hunter, and the learning of the savan united 
in himself, the Hunter Naturalist of America has pushed his 
way, rifle in hand, into the secret places and confidences of 
nature. He has carried her jealous defences by storm, and 
may almost be said to have ‘“ wooed her as the lion wooes his 
bride,” will ye, nill ye! There have been few such ardent 
investigators among the Old World Naturalists until of late. 
Though many of them have been great travellers, and have 
professed to examine the subjects of their favorite science, 
amidst native surroundings—yet in method and spirit they have 
been entirely unlike the American. While the American, in 
the confidence of practice and self-reliance, has been content 
to trust in his own good right arm for provision and defence, 
they have been sent out by Royal Institutes, with all the un- 
wieldy appointments of a scicntific progress, to explore the 
“sands and shores and desert wildernesses.” While he, with 
habits as hardy and simple as those of the wild creatures 
themselves, has moved among them without their being 
aware—has plucked the same berries, drank from the same 
spring, and rested beneath the same shades, with his calm, 
bright eye, like that of an invisible presence, forever upon 
their unconscious lives, has read them in their freedom 
like an unsealed book—the Europeans, with their lumbering 
trains, have brought dismay and terror into the startled soli- 
tudes, and at best have obtained nothing but unsatisfactory 
glimpses of retreating forms, or the clumsily slain “speci- 
