WAYS OF NATURE 
interest in the wild denizens of the field and wood, 
and foster a genuine love of them in the hearts of 
the young people, so far is their influence good; but 
so far as they pervert natural history and give false 
impressions of the intelligence of our animals, cater- 
ing to a taste that prefers the fanciful to the true and 
the real, is their influence bad. Of course the great 
army of readers prefer this sugar-coated natural 
history to the real thing, but the danger always is 
that an indulgence of this taste will take away a lik- 
ing for the real thing, or prevent its development. 
The knowing ones, those who can take these pretty 
tales with the pinch of salt of real knowledge, are 
not many; the great majority are simply entertained 
while they are being humbugged. There may be no 
very serious objection to the popular love of sweets 
being catered to in this field by serving up the life- 
history of our animals in a story, all the missing links 
supplied, and all their motives and acts humanized, 
provided it is not done covertly and under the guise 
of a real history. We are never at a loss how to take 
Kipling in his “Jungle Book;” we are pretty sure 
that this is fact dressed up as fiction, and that much 
of the real life of the jungle is in these stories. I 
remember reading his story of “The White Seal” 
shortly after I had visited the Seal Islands in Bering 
Sea, and I could not detect in the story one departure 
from the facts of the life-history of the seal, so far as 
it is known. Kipling takes no covert liberties with 
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