The Democratic advocate. [volume] (Westminster, Md.) 1865-1972, 1883-01-06
Ghings gbroad.
An English Naturalist's Difficulties.

There is only one country in the world
where the present writer is really afraid OF
venomous beasts, and that one country is
England. Deponent has lived good deal up
and down in the tropics and elsewhere. But
he knows no other land where ones life is
rendered SO often wretched by stinging
things as the British Isles. Not that even
here the venomous creatures enter largely
into ones everyday existence; but then,
elsewhere, in spite of prejudices to the con-
trary, they enter into it even less. just at
present, for example, our chalk-downs are
being infested by their annual plague OF
harvesters-harvest bugs our unsophisticat-
ed ancestors call them-but more refined
or more squeamish generation has got rid
of the ill-sounding, generic name-and 1t Is
impossible to walk now for half an hour
among grass or corn without coming home
a mass of swollen Jumps, with little red
beetle neatly inundated in the centre of
every self-raised tumulus. Naturally, you
scratch him, whereupon he dies and testers
in stu.
Alone among animals the harvester per-
forms his own burial, and then erects his
own funeral monument on top of his man
gled and dislocated corpse. His memory
remains green, or at least red, for fully a
week after his lamented demise. Now, one
would like to know what tropical pest is
worse or more persistent than this tiny
English beetle 1t may be freely admitted
that the mosquito does not possess single
trait in his character which justly entities
him either to our esteem or our affection,
but even the mosquito does not dig bodily
into the very tissues of his victim, and con-
tinue to irritate you long after he has
ceased to derive any sort of personal graft
fication from his unfriendly conduct. Be-
tween man and the mosquito it is an even
battle; he thirsts for your blood and you
thirst for his life. But between man and
the harvest bug the conflict is as unequal
as between a Nihilist and Gar; even if
you should kill him he goes on irritating
you internally, and ranking in your flesh
like poisoned arrow for whole days after
his little existence has ended forever. When
the brains are out the mosquito will die, but
die or not the harvest bug still continues his
deadly war against humanity, and lives after
death an objective immortality.
Of course the general public does not find
itself largely incommoded by these or 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 scorp-
ions, cobras and rattlesnakes in its garden
plat or its front shrubbery. 1t is quite
otherwise, however, with naturalists and
botanists, of whom the present writer is the
least. Such persons are compelled, In the
pursuit of beetles and orchids, to venture
into all sorts 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, gnats and hornets than he has
ever suffered in tropical climates from tar
antula, mosquitoes, terrapins or poisonous
serpents. The fact is, these tropical mar
vels are part and parcel of the exploded
tropical humbug. There is nothing mar
velous anywhere in our workaday age,
though there are some things disagreeable
like harvest bugs in England or mosqui-
toes on Nile dahabeeah.
You can see scorpions in the West Indies
if you choose, but only by hiring negro
to hunt one up for for you and bottle it in
spirits. There are venomous spiders In
Africa, no doubt; but if you want to get
one 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 every season; but it is
only very young grifins who believe the
traditional stories about their inroads into
the sacred precincts of European COM
pound 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 can find rather
more within mile radius of his own home
in England, if he chooses, than in any other
country in the known world. Whoever
wishes to indulge in practical natural history
can rob wasp's nest, induce hive of bees
to swarm around his head, irritate pep
perry old hornet, catch viper by the tail
and become the living tomb of thousand
harvest bugs without moving step outside
even the parliamentary limits of the coun-
ty of Middlesex. The only difference 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,
because they are so very far away. Yet
there is nothing at all romantic in the buzz
of a mosquito when once you get him at
close quarters within the curtains of your
own bed.
We have, however, in England one real
ly formidable creature who enters very little
into the ordinary life of the community at
large, but who forms a standing menace to
the unoffending naturalists in every part of
the British Islands, and that is the domes
tic but undomesticated bull. Tigers are un-
pleasant when you are butterfly hunting in
a Jungle, and alligators are nuisance when
you are catching fresh-water snails in
tropical 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 scientific 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
demonstrators, though to be sure, they say
the village headmen preserve the former
interesting quarry as far as possible, SO as
to induce an occasional visit from the wealth
dispensing British officer. With the bull,
however, it is quite otherwise. He is, in
fact, common object of the country to the
wandering field naturalist.
Almost every farm in England possesses
a BULL and, by an unfortunate coincidence,
he is always placed in the furtherest and
most retired field on the whole estate-the
nice, healthy, boggy, overgrown corner un-
der the hillside, where all the rare flowers,
all the strange insects, and all the queer
MOSES or fungi are invariably to be found.
Hence the bull is an ever-present wild beast
of the stray scientific inquirer, and very
formidable wild beast of his sort, to. The