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XATURE XOTES 
generally unpractical people, who are supposed to leave out of 
account the needs of the populace, on the one hand, for more 
houses and small holdings, or the claims of the well-to-do to 
erect certain games and pastimes into a society religion, and 
to pursue this religion recklessly, to the detriment, if need be, of 
the indigenous fauna and flora. 
I am sorry to be so much out of touch with the spirit of 
the age, so old-fashioned as to love the English landscape in 
its natural condition, and to wish to see it still peopled to a 
reasonable degree with birds and beasts characteristic of the 
country and its climate. It is no consolation to me that the 
rhododendron or the azalea should replace the osmunda fern, 
the rarer kinds of British orchids, the box and the fritillary. 
Why need we push to extremes the culture of the fox, which 
at most amuses about ten thousand people, or that of the 
pheasant, which may interest a hundred thousand ? The fox is 
a beautiful and interesting mammal ; by all means let it have 
its due place in our fauna; like the badger, weasel, stoat, pole- 
cat, marten — in short, every beast except the non-indigenous 
brown and black rats or the exceedingly destructive voles or 
field-mice. 
In the case of creatures like unduly destructive rats, mice 
and voles, or the sparrow, we need raise no voice in defence. 
On the contrary, we should join the Society for the Destruction 
of Vermin. I would exterminate the brown and black rats 
• altogether, because in every particular of their lives they are the 
foes of man and of many other mammals and birds. Neither 
the rat nor the sparrow is conspicuous or beautiful. The 
rhinoceros, the tiger, and even the bullfinch, on the contrary, 
atone for whatever annoyance they may cause by imposing bulk 
or beauty of coloration. 
Surely there must be other ways of learning to handle a 
shot gun than the almost mechanical slaughter of pheasants, 
and other incentives to good riding than the pursuit of a fox ? 
The pheasant is delicious as an article of food, and a joy to the 
eye from its beauty of plumage. It has been so long naturalized 
in Great Britain that it may well be regarded as having every 
claim to citizenship. Let it henceforth take its chance in our 
woods with the rest of the bird fauna, while in the poultry farms 
which we could maintain at great profit if the fox nuisance were 
abated, we could breed pheasants by the million for the table, 
without necessarily seeking for the extermination of owls, 
weasels, stoats, hawks, kites, crows, or even foxes, provided the 
latter kept to the places assigned to them. 
The preferable course to follow would be to create, in 
various parts of the British Islands, National Parks —reserves 
in which all wild creatures (except rats and sparrows) might 
be encouraged to increase and multiply — miniature Yellowstone 
Parks. A very suitable locality for such a paradise would be 
Achill Island, off the west coast of Ireland, to which already 
