NATURAL HISTORY AND PHYSIOGRAPHY OF NEW BRUNSWICK. 301 
Brunswick wilderness at least as great as Mr. Long's has given 
me such a knowledge of the difficulties of observing wild animals 
in their native haunts that I cannot believe that any one man has 
had all of the remarkable experiences reported by Mr. Long. 
Furthermore, the one case in which I happen to know personally 
the evidence on which Mr. Long bases a statement, does not 
allow me to entertain a high regard for his accuracy. In his 
book, “ School of the 'Woods,” he claims to have seen fish-hawks 
catch and wound fish which they then dropped back into the 
water in order to teach their young to dive for them. This state- 
ment is criticised by Mr. Burroughs in his article on “ Real and 
Sham Natural History,” in the Atlantic Monthly for March, 
1903, a,nd in his reply to this article in the North American Review 
for May, Mr. Long re-affirms it, and adds : “ Mr. Mauran Fur- 
bish, who probably knows more of the New Brunswick wilder- 
ness than any other man, has told me since my book was written 
that he had seen the same thing." Thinking I knew the incident 
on which this statement was based, I wrote Mr. Furbish, who 
has been my companion in two journeys into the wilderness of 
New Brunswick, asking what statement he had made to Mr. 
Long; he replied that he had simply told Mr. Long of our finding 
one day a wounded gaspereau floating at the foot of a lake, and 
that Mr. Long “ had furnished all the romance and the reason 
for their being there.” This incident, I believe, gives the clue 
to the character of much of Mr. Long’s work. He does not 
deliberately invent, but some trifling basis of fact happening to 
fit in with some theory developed by his sympathies is accepted 
by him as confirming his surmises, which he thereupon considers 
and publishes as proven. Mr. Long’s books undoubtedly contain 
a great deal of valuable fact, but this is so mixed with matter that 
cannot possibly be accepted simply on Mr. Long's statement, that 
it makes his work practically valueless as natural history. 
Mr. Roberts has thrown most, or all, of his writings upon 
animals into the story form. In his earlier works he made no 
claim to a first-hand knowledge of these animals, but a belief in 
such knowledge naturally became widely prevalent among his 
reviewers and others, and he took no steps to correct the impres- 
