106 
ANNUAL ADDRESS. 
Unfortunately this is a very common and a very pernicious habit ; 
and many otherwise sound men have done more harm than good as 
naturalists by adopting it. 
Richard Jefferies rather fell under its sway ; Mr. Grant Allen 
certainly did ; and the monthly illustrated journals and a great deal 
of to-day's literature are full of it. Take one or two examples. 
Mr. Grant Allen described very well some of the habits of the 
Butcher-bird. But he biassed his own mind and that of his readers 
from the outset by saying that the Butcher-bird was cruel. This 
led him to give, to my mind, a totally wrong impression. He 
took great pains to describe the horrors of the Butcher-bird's 
larder ; he describes a shrew-mouse impaled on a long thorn, 
slowly torn in bits, and suffering torture for days, so that at the 
end of his description one is inclined to think that the Butcher-bird 
is a nasty beast, especially as Grant Allen omits to say that the 
bird is merely following the instinct of his race. He rather implies 
that he knows full well what suffering he is causing. All this is 
very objectionable. The Butcher-bird's larder is not always quite 
a pleasant sight, but it is not as he describes it, I think. And it is 
absurd to call the animal cruel. He is absolutely free from a 
moment's thought on the subject of his victim's sufferings. 
Then a modern writer, much praised by reviewers, has given 
many well-written pictures of animals in a wild state. He puts 
human thoughts and passions and feelings into all of them. The 
consequence is that nature appears in his writings merely the 
workshop of a cruel devil, where animals torture and kill each 
other, and cold and hunger torture the rest. 
This much to be condemned method is the result partly of 
insufficient observation, but still more of starting with the idea that 
all creatures should be judged and measured by a human standard. 
It is in fact not imagination, but the serious ivant of it. 
(3) Then there are exaggerative and other inaccurate methods, 
the most fatal of all, and the easiest to fall into. No one can read 
old travels without being much struck by this : a large bird is 
described as yards across the wings, the whale is as big as a 
mountain, and sharks' mouths are wide enough to swallow a man 
whole. Baron Munchausen is reproduced again and again. 
The frankly exaggerative method has of course nothing to be 
said except in the way of condemnation ; but great mistakes and 
unconscious exaggeration arise very easily, chiefly from four 
causes : (1) preconceived ideas, (2) mistakes of the senses, (3) delay 
in registering result of observations, and (4) insufficient observation. 
As an example of the danger of a preconceived idea, I may 
give the well-known incident of the fire at the Crystal Palace. On 
December 30th, 1866, the north wing was destroyed by fire, 
causing a loss of property estimated at ^150,000. Thousands of 
spectators watched the fire, and a report got abroad that a tame 
monkey had escaped and was on the roof. To the horror of the 
spectators it was seen by hundreds of the expectant crowd dancing 
about, waving its arms, and finally sinking in the flames. Yet no 
monkey was there at all, and what the crowd saw was the result 
