Vill Unexplored Spain 
them to discern the line where Nature stops and where fraud 
and “faking” begin. At any rate we frequently read purring 
approval of what appears to us meretricious imposture, and see 
writers lauded as constellations whom we should condemn as 
charlatans. Beyond the Atlantic President Roosevelt (as he 
then was) went bald-headed for the “ Nature-fakers,” and in 
America the reader has been put upon his guard. If he still 
likes “sensations”—well, that’s what he likes. But he buys 
such fiction forewarned. 
In the illustration of wild-life our views are also, in some 
degree, divergent from current ideas. Animal-photography has 
developed with such giant strides and has taught us such valuable 
lessons (for which none are more grateful than the Authors), that 
there is danger of coming to regard it, not as a means to an end 
but as the actual end itself. While photography promises uses 
the value of which it would be difficult to exaggerate, yet it has 
defects and limitations which should not be ignored. First as 
regards animals in motion ; the camera sees too quick—-so infinitely 
quicker than the human eye that attitudes and effects are 
portrayed which we do not, and cannot see. Witness a photograph 
of the finish for the Derby. Galloping horses do not figure so 
on the human retina—with all four legs jammed beneath the 
body like a dead beetle. No doubt the camera exhibits an unseen 
phase in the actual action and so reveals its process; but that 
phase is not what mortals see. Similarly with birds in flight, 
the human eye only catches the form during the instantaneous 
arrest of the wing at the end of each stroke—in many cases not 
even so much as that. But the camera snaps the whirling pinion 
at mid-stroke or at any intermediate point. The result is 
altogether admirable as an exposition of the mechanical processes of 
flight; but it fails as an illustration, inasmuch as it illustrates a 
pose which Nature has expressly concealed from our view. 
Secondly, in relation to still life. Here the camera is not 
only too quick, but too faithful. A tiny ruffled plume, a feather 
caught up by the breeze with the momentary shadow it casts, 
even an intrusive bough or blade of grass—all are repro- 
