164 
NATURE NOTES 
tical Latin, “ Quantum maxillam ! What cheek ! ” For what 
principles other than humane does the writer imagine the 
Selborne Society to have ever existed ? Can he have read the 
very passage from Sir John Lubbock which he prints ? Sir 
John said that Mr. Gladstone’s words, “ Kindness, kindness, 
ldndness, nothing but kindness on every side,” were no doubt 
“ an utterance of gratitude on his part, but as a guiding principle 
of life it expressed the ideal of the Selborne Society.” What 
evidence is there here of the adoption of any new principles ? 
The president of a society simply quotes the words of a great 
man recently dead, as illustrating what always has been, and 
always will be, the ideal of the society over which he presides. 
Is not the writer in Humanity aware that many members of the 
Selborne Society are also members of the Humanitarian League, 
and that many others have already done all in their power to 
support the Spurious Sports Bill ? We may not always endorse 
every opinion expressed by a contemporary ; we may doubt, for 
example, whether it would have been easy to convict the rat- 
worrier charged at Westminster, to whose case reference was 
made both at our Annual Meeting and in the pages of Humanity, 
under the Spurious Sports Bill, had that measure been already 
law : we may not care to advocate vegetarianism on humane 
grounds in the English climate ; but surely it is better for the 
advocates of humanity to consider how they can co-operate 
rather than how they can criticise one another’s methods. 
Another thought was uttered at our Annual Meeting which 
we would gladly emphasise and illustrate. Sir Edward Fry 
suggested that it was a happy sign of the progress of the public 
conscience in such matters that, though Martin's Act was a 
comparatively recent addition to the statute-book, it was already 
being criticised as too narrow in its scope, confined as it is to 
cruelty to domesticated animals. This is the progressive 
humanity of which we would now write. We have, we are 
glad to say, received several letters of protest against our even 
printing Mr. James Partridge’s letter on his shooting a kestrel 
(p. 137), letters which declare our editorial censure conveyed in 
the heading, “ A Gun instead of a Field Glass,” to be far too 
mild for the occasion, and which couple Mr. Partridge’s killing 
a hen kestrel in the breeding season with Mr. Seton Karr’s 
remarkable methods of manifesting his love for all dumb 
animals. “ A. H. W.” writes from Richmond: — 
“ Unhappily that time must still he very remote when men of education and 
intelligence continue to see no wrong in showing their love for wild creatures 
by killing them. . . . Since Mr. Partridge’s unhappy shot there is now one 
beautiful creature the less in North Devon — one kestrel less to gladden the eyes 
of nature lovers as she shoots along on her swift pinions or hangs poised in mid 
air. . . . No doubt Mr. Partridge would claim that he yields to none in his 
love of all wild creatures, but such love must be like that of the Conqueror for 
the red deer in his New Forest — love for them for the pleasure of destroying 
them. . . . Deliberately to kill rare and beautiful creatures in this anything 
but wild England of ours becomes, it seems to me, an act of wanton and mali- 
cious destructiveness, worthy only of the brutal natures of urchin boys, and an 
