BATTLES OF BIRDS AND BEASTS.
(TO THE EDITOR OF THE -spaarszoa...] 5i,—If ocular testimony is of any service in the discussion on this familiar topic reopened in the Spectator, permit me to state that I unquestionably saw a couple of thresher sharks persecuting some species of whale off Moreton Island, on the East Coast of Australia, in the autumn of 1895. We steamed so close on the Maraiwa ' that we could plainly hear the resounding blows as the sharks flogged their great victim. Your correspondent's suggestion that travellers have regarded as a shark the whale's own tail-fin is quite untenable in the case I have in memory, for we were able to see daylight between the attackers and attacked. That some of the smaller and fiercer cetaceans also combine at times against the more timid giants of their order I understand to be true, but the Moreton Island aggressors were threshers, or so at least I am personally convinced. The obligations of a mail-packet prevented our staying to see the end of this unequal combat, which can, however, only have gone one way. Without for a moment imputing any such offence to your correspondent, I always resent the self-possession with which some men who stay at home flatly deny the accounts of Nature's wonders given by men who have travelled thousands of miles to see them. There are, it is true, travellers' tales that deserve the pillory ; but the dolce far niente of the carping armchair critic is more maddening almost than the wildest fabrication of /ictunchausen or his imitators.—I am, Sir, &c.,
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