The book of a naturalist Author:William Henry Hudson Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: Ill The bat was formerly looked upon as an uncanny sort of bird, and described as such in the old natural histories. Oh, those ever delightful old natural his... more »tories, and the vision of the wise old naturalist examining a recently-taken specimen through his horn-bound spectacles, and setting it gravely down in his books that it is the only known bird which was clothed in fur in place of feathers! Or, as Plinius puts it, the only bird which brings forth and suckles its young, just as we say that the Australian water-mole is the only mammal which lays eggs. The modern ornithologist will have nothing to do with the creature; but after his expulsion from the feathered nation it was his singular good fortune not to sink lower in the scale; he was, on the contrary, raised to the mammalians, or quadrupeds, as our fathers called them; then on the discovery being made that he was anatomically related to the lemurs, he was eventually allotted a place in our systems next after that ancient order of fox-faced monkeys. And thus it has come to pass that when someone writes a book on the mammals of this island, which has no monkeys or lemurs, and man cannot be included in such works on account of an old convention or prejudice, he is obliged to give the proud first place to this very poor relation. It is his misfortune, since it would have been more agreeable to the general reader if he could have led off with some imposing beast—the extinct wolf or tusky wild boar, for example—or, better still, with the white cattle of Chillingham, or the roaring stag with his grand antlers. The last is an undoubted survival, one which, encountered in some incult place where it is absolutely free and wild, moves us to a strange joy — an inherited memory and a vision of a savage, prehistoric land of which we...« less