IRatuie IRotes : 
Cbe Sdbonie Society’s f1f)aoa5(ne. 
No. 64. APRIL, 1895. VoL. VI. 
MISS BENSON AND HER PETS.- 
^alNCE Mrs. Brightwen’s Wild Nature won by Kindness 
was issued in 1890, there has appeared, I think, no 
fresher or more independent collection of stories about 
animals than that which Miss Benson has just pub- 
lished under the title of Subject to Vanity. Miss Benson is a 
delicate student of animal psychology, and differentiates between 
individuals of the same species with a finesse which appears to 
me to be her best quality, as an observer. In saying this, I 
mean to distinguish between her grasp of character in animals 
and her conception of the forms of expression which that 
character takes. She has much humour, and a gift for amusing 
us by oddities of diction ; she applies this humour largely to 
her pets, and she wins our laughter with ease. But I do not 
think that, in this direction, she always avoids what we may 
call the Landseer fallacy, the trick of making animals vastly 
entertaining by representing them as travesties of ourselves. 
This is a gift, of a kind, but one which alarms the naturalist ; 
it is therefore in the less amusing but sounder capacity of a 
fine observer of individual character that we specially applaud 
her. It is easy to be funny about the conjectured emotions of 
guinea-pigs or canaries ; it is hard, it needs a very special eye, 
to detect and define the personal qualities which distinguish 
one canary or guinea-pig from another. 
It is in dealing with domesticated animals, of course, that 
these distinctions of individual character are most plainly seen. 
More than this, it is probably the conditions of confinement, 
the cessation of the primal savage anxieties with regard to food. 
Subject to Vanity, by .Margaret Benson. Methuen & Co. Price 3s. 6cl. 
