244 
INSULARITY, 
county manuals—of birds, &c.—does not partly point in the 
same direction. I am referring chiefly to local ornithological 
manuals. These are mostly written — though there are 
notable exceptions—by ornithologists of mark, and with 
great ability, and are valuable contributions to knowledge, as 
far as they go. They are also, with the exceptions I have 
alluded to, an element which no writer on general ornithology 
would dream of disregarding, but from which he would 
receive valuable hints on the question of distribution. But 
writers on general ornithology are not numerous—and the 
copies which are published are — and where do they all go to ? 
Whose hands do they fall into ? Into the hands of those, I 
am afraid, to a great extent, who are either resident in the 
county or personally interested in it, and who want to know, 
or who think they ought to know, a little of the local birds — 
but not much—and who see in a county manual, and in the 
artificial boundaries of the county itself, a convenient 
dividing line between the amount of knowledge which it is 
worth while contemplating the distant acquisition of, and the 
wider field of general ornithological study, in which they 
have no ambition to be explorers, and which they mean to 
disregard. 
And speaking of ornithology, I am afraid that it is partly 
made, owing to its present popularity, a kind of literary 
stalking-horse, a sort of peg to hang another sort of literary 
ventures on. In some of the magazines and periodicals 
which are devoted to light articles on general literature, and 
occasionally in the daily papers, there are occasional articles 
on natural history subjects (or, at all events, taking a natural 
history text), many of which would never, perhaps, have been 
written but for the popularity of the late Mr. Richard Jefferies, 
the able author of “ The Gamekeeper at Home,” and a number 
of like works. But the magazine articles of which I am 
speaking are written without the close observation of the 
gentleman I have named, and they mostly select what may 
be termed the romantic side of natural history, and it is 
doubtful whether they are of real benefit to any but the 
writer. They are little else than specimens of the prevalent 
disease (shall I call it ?) of fine writing, of which the modern 
novel is the chief seat, and it is in the last degree unfortu¬ 
nate that natural history subjects should be selected as the 
theatre for such displays. “It is magnificent,” • a foreign 
gentlemen of some celebrity said of the charge of Balaklava, 
“ but it is not war.” In the same way, we may say of these 
articles, and of the books into which they occasionally 
expand, “ they are all very pretty, but they are not natural 
