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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