13 MARCH 1869, Page 21

THE NATURALIST IN NORWAY.*

IF any excuse be needed for our treating this book from any other than a scientific point of view, it will be found in the author's evident intention to attract the general public. Dr. Bowden may have classified the beasts, birds, and plants of Norway for the sake of learned readers ; he may have had them in view when he filled his last chapter with lists of the rhinanthacem and the juncem ; but when he quotes impossible legends from Pontoppidan as well as from more modern though less famous narrators, it is clear that amusement is his object. There can be no harm in his attempting more than was aimed at by the poets of whom Horace told us, and wishing at once prodesse and delectare. But he must not complain if most of his readers and all his reviewers confine themselves to one of these branches. There is quite enough in his book to interest us without our going into abstruse and difficult questions either of natural history or botany. Any of his instances which we may disbelieve are liable to be questioned on the most general grounds of credibility, and it is clear that he himself will not defend the most extravagant. But though the simple repetition of such stories would be a blot on a grave scientific treatise, it does not detract from the merits of a book of popular gossip.

The chief thing to be said in favour of Dr. Bowden's work is that Norway offers an ample field for the naturalist. In the year 1855 there were no leas than 205 bears, 235 wolves, 123 lynxes, and 2,559 eagles and other birds of prey either killed or taken alive. "My country," said an eminent Norwegian naturalist, with equal truth and feeling, "can well spare some of its wild animals and birds of prey." Yet the gain to Norway would be a loss to such writers as Dr. Bowden. The bears, wolves, lynxes, and eagles furnish his best materials. We have a telling picture of a bear standing on ite hind legs and grinning with amicable ferocity at a Peasant who is driving his knife into its breast. Formerly bears used to come so close to Christiania that the citizens turned out regularly to hunt them. This, of course, is not the case now, though Dr. Bowden once found himself close to a wolf on the Christiania Fjord, and a lady driving in the neighbourhood of Christiania had her lap dog carried off from her sledge. The Norwegian tradition of an Englishman advertising for rooms in the outskirts of the town of Christiania, and specifying that the parlour must be on the second floor, so that he might shoot bears

as they passed his window, must refer to a state of things long past, if it be not a sheer invention. Yet a sportsman of Dr.. Bowden's acquaintance said he had killed thirty-one bears, and in some parts of the country they are very common. Even there they do not cause much alarm. They are always more ready to get out of the way than to thrust themselves into society. The abject way in which they succumb to the most diminutive animals is enough to set them down as rank cowards. The hedgehog is said to drive the bear out of his own den by a ludicrous process of adverse possession. It simply walks in and remains there. The bear is astonished at such presumption, and not being very well able to make out what so small an animal is, puts his nose to the hedgehog's body. The hedgehog pricks the bear's nose. Whatever the bear does, he is exposed to the same discipline. Whether he moves about his den, or lies down in it, or stands on his hind legs, or stretches out his paws, he comes in contact with the hedgehog. If he goes to sleep, the hedgehog crawls upon him and darts its prickles into the bear's tenderest parts, causing him, as Dr.

Bowden says, or rather surmises, to have unpleasant dreams. This is too much for the bear, and he rushes out of his den to complain of his dreams to some sympathizing naturalist. What the ermine does to the bear is even more disastrous in its final consequences. It rushes at him in a storm of passion, its eyes sparkling with rage, and hangs on to his ear, biting and scratching with all its force. The bear shakes his head in vain, the ermine clings all the faster and bites all the harder. At last the bear can stand it no longer, but puts his head down and rushes blindly into space, ending his career by a tumble over the first precipice he comes to, while the ermine has sufficient presence of mind to let go its hold just before the fatal leap relieves it of its victim. However, when the ermine tries the same dodge on the eagle it is signally foiled. One soar aloft, and then a violent shake, send it down headlong. The hedgehog in like manner finds the fox a more formidable adversary than the bear. But the fox's procedure is a little too. scientific to be quoted in these columns.

Whatever may be the inferiority of the Norwegian bear to those of other countries, the Norwegian fox fully sustains the character of his tribe. The way in which he ejects the badger from its den is open to much the same objection as the story of his unrolling the hedgehog. But when we come to his method of taking eggs, or catching crabs and oysters, or stealing honey, or getting rid of fleas, we may quote safely. Whether we are to believe or not is another question. Probably it will be best to withhold our faith from the account of the string of foxes lowered down a perpendicular rock in search of seabirds' eggs. What Dr. Bowden says, is that.

the foxes begin by having a wrestling-match, to see which of them is the strongest. The winner throws itself over the cliff, hanging

on to the edge by its paws. Then the second in point of strength creeps over the first fox's back and holds on by its tail ; the rest follow in order, and the last fox bags the eggs. The climax

fills Dr. Bowden himself with doubt. He asks how the foxes get. back again, and suggests that if the first fox let go there would be a

fearful catastrophe. We presume the object of the wrestling match is to provide against any such contingency, but supposing a strong fox has a weak tail, and while his paws are holding on valiantly the roots of his tail crack and give way together? The result would be fatal to all the rest of the string, and a matter of serious inconvenience to the one at the top. We see from Dr. Bowden's other stories that a tailless Norwegian fox is worse off than his proverbial ancestor. If iEsop had known much about.

the habits of foxes, he need not have resorted to general sarcasm when there was a ready and cogent retort at his disposal. His foxes might have replied to their mutilated brother that he could no longer use his tail as a trap for catching crabs, small lobsters, and oysters, that he was absolutely debarred from the enjoyment of honey. It is true that he might still range fish-heads in a row,

and spring out on the first crow which was attracted by the bait. He might still hide behind a stone near the favourite fishing

ground of the otter, ready to spring up when the otter came out of the water, and to run off with the fish which was dropped

in the first moment of surprise. And he might be almost lighter and more fit for the following enterprise, which does the greatest

credit to his foresight :—

" ' A certain jiigare, who was one morning keeping watch in the forest, saw a fox cautiously making his approach towards the stump of an old tree. When sufficiently near, he took a high and determined jump on to the top of it, and, after looking round a while, hopped to the ground again. After Roynard bad repeated this knightly exercise several times, he went his way, but presently returned to the spot bearing a pretty large and heavy piece of dry oak in his mouth, and thus burdened, and as it would seem for the purpose of testing his vaulting powers, he renewed his leaps on to the stump. After a time, however, and when he

found that, weighted as he was, he could make the ascent with facility, he desisted from further efforts, dropped the piece of wood from his mouth, and coiling himself upon the top of the stump remained motionless as if dead. At the approach of evening an old sow and her progeny, five or six in number, issued from a neighbouring thicket, and, pursuing their usual track, passed near to the stump in question. Two of her sucklings followed somewhat behind the rest, and just as they neared his ambush, Michel, with the rapidity of thought, darted down from his perch upon one of them, and in the twinkling of an eye bore it in triumph on to the fastness he had so providently prepared beforehand. Confounded at the shrieks of her offspring, the old sow returned in fury to the spot, and until late in the night made repeated desperate attempts to storm the murderer's stronghold ; but the for took the matter very coolly, and devoured the pig under the very nose of its mother.'"

The way in which the fox rids itself of fleas reminds us of Mr. Kinglake's description of the Arab's enlisting the help of ants with the same object. The fox takes a small bunch of straw or hair in his mouth, and gets quietly into the water. His small tormentors, fearing a watery grave, fly for refuge to the floating straw or hair, and the fox, finding that they have taken up their abode in it, lets it drift away with them. From these and other signs of intelli gence the fox has earned a favourable reputation in Norway. " Michel " is the friendly name given it by the peasants. The wolf, on the other hand, is trapped and killed relentlessly. Sometimes parties of men go out in a sledge with a young pig as a decoy; the squeaks of the pig attract the wolves to the spot, and theirlove of pork often prevails over their constitutional timidity. If, however, a pack of wolves happens to be near, the sport may end fatally for the hunters, and winter travel in Norway is exposed to the same perils. A friend of Dr. I3owden's was nearly attacked on the Dovre Fjeld by half-a-dozen wolves, who pursued him to the door of the Jerkin station. We have seen, too, that in winter wolves come very near the capital, and it may be a question for those adventurous sportsmen who have exhausted so many fields ef enterprise whether a winter in Norway would not have something new to offer. Dr. Bowden's book may follow in the track -of Mr. Barnard's Sport in Norway, and of Mr. Lloyd's elaborate volumes on Sweden. The picture of the snow-skates on which the elk is pursued in winter, and of the skaters tearing down a long reach of snowy mountain, at the bottom of which two lie sprawling on their backs, is enough to stir the Viking blood within us, especially as we have had no ice this winter. Yet it would have been better if these skates had been drawn -correctly, and if Dr. Bowden had not forgotten that one of them is always shorter than the other. It would have been well, too, if Dr. Bowden had not been so reckless in his statements about the quality of certain salmon rivers ; for two which he mentions as excellent—the Vik and the Gudvangen rivers—are not to be relied on. His comparison of the Mjtisen Lake to the Lake of Como, again, would never have occurred to one who had seen them both. Perhaps his wildest story is that of the man who while bathing in the Christiania Fjord was set upon and devoured by a shoal of mackerel. "He was seen struggling in the water, with his arms and the upper part of his body covered with mackerel as thick as bees." if this had been told by Bishop Pontoppidan we should have known what to make of it. But Dr. Bowden has not the episcopal privilege of dealing in the miraculous.