146 
The Balance of Nature. 
[April, 
made an approach or passage to the wings ; whilst the bird 
itself was progressing in the circle or leading round, in 
order to inosculate with the posteriors of its antecedent. 
He who clearly understands the quinary system will readily 
understand this.” Scientific nomenclature he avoided, and 
even denounced as abstruse, complicated, and incomprehen- 
sible — a view likely enough to be taken up by one of the 
working-class naturalists who used to be met with in the 
North, but strange and scarcely consistent in a gentleman 
who had received a classical education, and who was rather 
too much given to Latin quotations. Had he lived in our 
days this prejudice for a vernacular terminology might have 
been a pardonable and even useful protest. Generalisation was 
not his department. Those questions concerning the origin, 
the modifications, and the distribution of species, which are 
agitating the zoologists and botanists of our time, and which 
must be definitely answered before Natural History can be for- 
mally ranked as a Science, do not appear ever to have pre- 
sented themselves to his mind. He accepted every bird and 
beast as an ultimate fadt ; he scrutinised its structure, noted 
its habits, but never enquired why it was found in one country 
and not in another, nor what were its relations to other 
species, co-existent or extinCL Neither can Waterton be 
regarded as free from prejudices. He stoutly upholds the 
conventional dodtrine of a great gulf between man and the 
lower animals — a distinction not of degree, but of kind. 
He denies reason to dogs, to foxes, to apes, and, in short, 
to all the lower animals, and regards it as a characteristic 
of man alone. All instances of rationality on the part of 
bird or beast he regards with an excessive scepticism, 
somewhat singular in a man who could record his firm 
belief in the miraculous liquefaction of the blood of 
St. Januarius, at Naples. He entertained the view that no 
carnivorous animai could be gregarious, and hence was led 
to deny that wolves and other Canidse were naturally in the 
habit of hunting in packs, and of adting in concert to secure 
their prey. It is needless to say that had he ever visited 
Russia, or the more northern parts of North America, he 
would soon have found overwhelming evidence to the con- 
trary, and might easily have been convinced of his mistake 
by his own observations. In addition to the dog tribe, the 
common weasel has been known to run in packs, and men 
have occasionally been hard set to escape with their lives 
from the pertinacious attack of a band of these little 
yermin. 
Waterton also denies that serpents, unless trodden upon 
