IIIO The American Naturalist. [November, 
Miss Cooper, a daughter of the novelist, James Fenimore Cooper, 
states that when in Paris she saw a French translation of her father’s 
tale, ** The Spy," in which there were several mistakes, but one of 
them was such that it was almost incredible that any one could pos- 
sibly have been guilty of it. The residence of Mr. Wharton, one of 
the characters who figure in the story, is spoken of by the author as 
**'The Locusts. Now, the translator had been evidently ignorant of 
the circumstance of there being any species of trees bearing this 
name. Having, therefore, looked out the word in his dictionary, and 
finding the definition to be given as “les sauterelles’’ (grasshoppers), 
thus he rendered it in the text, Presently, however, he came across a 
paragraph in the novel in which it was stated that a visitor to the 
house of Mr. Wharton had tied his horse to a locust. Then it might 
be naturally supposed that the translator would have at once discovered 
his error. Nota bit of it! His reasoning would appear to have been 
somewhat on a parity with that of a celebrated countryman of his 
when he declared that “if the facts do not agree with the theory, so 
much the worse for the facts." Nevertheless, the writer seems to have 
been conscious that some explanation was due of so extraordinary a 
statement as that a horseman had secured his steed to a grasshopper. 
So he went on to gravely inform his readers that in America these 
insects grow to an enormous size, and that in this case one of these— 
dead and stuffed—had been stationed at the door of the mansion for 
the convenience of visitors on horseback.— Bookmark. 
