22 



THE NATURALIST. 



lovers of animated nature. Of my own personal knowledge, and from wliat 

 I can gather from the testimony of others better ahle, from their longer 

 experience, to judge more correctly in the matter, they are gradually hut 

 surely becoming scarce and this too in a district which in the early recollection 

 of our older inhabitants was comparatively thickly peopled by them. If this 

 decrease of the badger be correspondingly great in other parts of Great 

 Britain, I fear there may be reason to apprehend the severance of a link 

 in our native Mustelidce, and that Meles Taxus, will become as completely 

 lost to us as the gigantic elk, which once roamed in all his majesty and 

 conscious superiority, over the misty blue peaks of Helvellyn, the lofty and 

 giddy heights of Ben-E"evis, or the cloud-capped summits of our own more 

 modest Cheviots. This diminution in their numbers may be in a great measure 

 attributable to the persistent and unmerited persecution to which from time 

 immemorial they have been subjected. Up to the present time, if a badger 

 is known to haunt a particular locale he is immediately sought after and 

 encompassed by human foes, and sooner or later he is made to succumb to 

 some one or other of their ingenious modes of capture, that he may be made 

 the object wherewith to test the merits and hardiness of their dogs in what 

 is popularly known as a " badger bait." The sooner the complete abnegation 

 of this demoralizing practice takes place, the greater will be the chance of 

 retaining Meles Taxus, a living representative amongst our indigenous 

 mammalia. 



The tout ensemble of the badger by reason of his short legs and heavy 

 body is awkward and ungainly, and from the same cause his mode of locomo- 

 tion is clumsy, and in many respects ludicrous, being something between a 

 shuffling walk and a slow amble, which is at all times deviating and irregular, 

 and stands out in strong contradistinction to the i:est of the weasel tribe, 

 which are all pre-eminently graceful in their soft, lythe and undulatory 

 movements. 



His food is varied and comprises both animal and vegetable substances. 

 When the one fails him he falls back upon the other and between the two 

 seldom wants a plenteous meal on which he thrives and generally attains, 

 without luxuriating daily on turtle or soup julienne, to aldermanic corpulency 

 before retiring to his bower in the hybernating months. Like the Ursid\ 

 he displays a great liking for honey, which he appropriates with th 

 utmost sang froid, caring little or nothing for the stings of the enraged bees 

 his thick mantle of fur proving a successful barrier to their combined attacks 

 Frogs and other members of the hatracliian order ; beetles, grasshoppers 



