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BULLETIN OF THE NATURAL HISTORY SOCIETY. 
of observation, etc., comes from reviewers and others who have 
themselves no real knowledge of the matters concerned, while 
those who actually know the subject are either silent or very 
unfavorable in their comments. It is the humanization and 
idealization of animals, which, under the influence of the remark- 
able literary skill of these authors, has made their animal stories 
so popular. To accomplish this end, they have had to cut loose 
from the trammels of fact which hampered their predecessors, 
and have given their imaginations full play, thus producing 
fascinating works of fiction disguised as natural history. It is, 
however, this disguise which constitutes the ground of criticism 
against these works. We all agree that the use of animals as the 
heroes of romances, or of other imaginative writing, is perfectly 
legitimate; it is only when such works profess at the same time 
to be accurate in their natural history, thus misleading their read- 
ers and pretending to a character to which they have no honest 
claim, that they become open to scientific criticism. 
Mr. Long has published five books on animals, containing 
many references to New Brunswick. He claims repeatedly that 
his works are records of accurate fact discovered by his own 
observation in the field, and there is no question that he has given 
much study to animals in their native haunts. The most char- 
acteristic feature of the books, especially of those later-written, 
is the remarkable number and marvellous character of the ex- 
periences the author claims to have had in his observations of 
animals, and such wonders grow steadily through the series. 
The aggregate of his reported observations, both as to quantity 
and character, is such that, if all he states is true, he must have 
seen more widely and deeply into animal life than all other 
students of animal habits taken together. There is, of course, 
nothing inherently impossible in this, but its probability is em- 
phatically denied by his writings themselves, which seem to me 
to show that he has little idea of the nature of evidence or of 
logical proof, and that he possesses neither the temperament nor 
the training essential to a disinterested observer. I have no 
proof, with the single exception noted below, that any individual 
statement of Mr. Long’s is untrue ; but an experience in the New 
