Morning journal and courier., 1882-10-13

continues his deadly war against humanity, and lives after death an objective immortali- ty.
 Of course, the general public does not find itself largely incommoded by these other venomous creatures in England but then the general public does not go hunting about in meadows and marshes for strange plants and curious animals nor does it in other countries come casually across scorpions, cobras and rattlesnakes in it's green-plot or it's front shubbery. It is quite otherwise, however, with naturalists and botanists of whom the present writer is the least. Such persons compelled, in the pursuits of beetles and orchids, to venture into all sorts 1 of strange places and it may be fairly said of one such at least, that he suffers far more in England from harvest-bugs, wasps, gnGts and hornets than he has ever suffered in tropical climates from tarantulas, mosqui- toes, terrapins poisonous serpents. The fact is, these tropical marvels are part and parcel of the exploded tropical humbug. There is nothing marvellous anywhere in our workaday age, though there are some things disagreeable-like harvest bugs in England or mosquitoes on & Nile dahabeeah. You can see scorpions in the West Indies if you choose, but only by hiring negro to hunt one up for you and bottle it in spirits. There are venomous spiders in Africa, no doubt, but if you want to get you must set native to dig him out of the bank and bring him to you lying helpless on his back
 in shovelful of earth. To be sure, snakes kill many black hunters in the Indian jungle season; but it is only very young grifins who believe the traditional stories about their inroads into the sacred precincts of European compound or their casual appearance in the secret recesses of your largest boots The man who hunts for such things alone finds them ; and, on the whole, he find rather more within a miles radius of his home in England if he chooses, than in any other country in the known world Whoever wishes O in
 rob wasp's nest, induce hive of bees to swarm around his head, irritate a peppery
 old hornet, catch a reluctant old viper by the tail, and become the living tomb of thou sand harvest bugs, without moving single
 step outside even the parliamentary limits of
 the county of Middlesex. The only differ
 ence is that in England nobody thinks much
 of these things, because they are so familiar;
 whereas in books of tropical travel they all sound delightfully."- strange and romantic be-
 cause they are so very far away Yet there
 is nothing at all romantic in the buzz of 8
 mosquito when once you get him at close
 quarters within the curtains of your own
 bed.
 We have, however, in England one really
 formidable creature who enters very little
 i5 to the ordinary life of the community at
 large, but who forms a standing menace to
 the unoffending naturalist in every part of
 the British Islands, and that is the domestic
 but undomesticated bull. Tigers are un-
 u
 jungle, and alligators are a nuisance when
 you arc catching fresh water snails in a trop teal American river, but the present writer
 has never come across tiger or an alligator
 in the flesh; he has only feared them from afar as threatened interruption to his scien-
 life pursuits, Besides, even if you do meet live tiger, you can shoot him at your own
 free discretion; there is no close season as
 yet for man eaters or for boa-constrictors,
 though to be sure, they say the village head
 men preserve the former interesting quarry as far possible, so as to induce occa-
 sional visit from the wealth dispensing Brit
 ish officer. With the bull, however, it is quite otherwise. He is, in fact, a common
 object of the country to the wandering field
 naturalist. Almost every farm in England
 possesses bull, and, by an unfortunate coincidence, he is always placed in the
 furthest and most retired field on the whole
 estste-the nice, healthy, boggy, overgrown
 corner under the hillside, where all the rare flowers all the strange insects, and all the queer mosses fungi are invariably to be found. Hence the bull is ever-present wild beast to the stray scientific inquirer, and a very formidable wild beast of his sort, too. The worst of 1t all is, you cannot even protect yourself against him with rihe as against the tiger or the alligator, for he is preserved even more vigorously and etfectually than that sacredest of British l sacred birds-a sitting hen pheasant. If you kill him, you are guilty of felony or touricide or petty treason, some abstruse crime of l that sort whereas if he kills you it is only death by misadventure, because you were trespassing somebody else's ground; for 1 of course every naturalist is callous as poacher about his neighbours landmark; the path of science invariably leads him into some other fellows fields or copses Thus ! the bull really becomes the standing bugbear of the British field naturalist; he is perpetu- ally coming upon you excitedly round | corner, or charging with his head between 1 his legs at the exact moment when you have ] just lighted upon 8 rare and almost unique | chronological specimen,