ANIMALS OF NORTH AMERICA.*
THE main lines of Mr. Thompson Seton's fascinating volumes are, as might be expected, a little different from those of other natural histories. The author of Wild Animals I have Known. and The Biography of a Grizzly would not be likely to cast a magnum opus into a shape already familiar ; he would leave his own character scored deep on any subject he chose to treat. And here we have, in two large volumes, natural history as Mr. Thompson Seton thinks it should be written and illustrated. He has taken the mammals of Manitoba for his particular study, which means, practically speaking, the animals of the United States, for his sixty species exclude only about a dozen of those which belong to North America; and he has endeavoured to show these animals to his readers as the animals have shown themselves to him during thirty years of personal observation. In addition, he has collected the observations of others, always with the view of adding further information about the living animal rather than biological or anatomical detail. To some naturalists, as he puts it, wild animals are mere living targets. They have seen in the wild life round them " nothing but savage or timorous creatures, killing or escaping being killed." They quite forget that animals "have their homes, their mates, their problems and their sorrows—in short, a home life that is their real life, and very often much larger and more important than that of which our hostile standpoint has given us such fleeting glimpses."
We need not reargue here the question of how far we are justified in reading into the lives of animals the hopes and fears and loves and hates which belong to the thought of mankind. We may merely take Mr. Seton's facts as trust- worthy data, and build upon them his own theory or any other theory we please. For himself, he sees his conclusions, or the general direction to which his facts will carry him, clearly enough. He finds that his observations fit in with a theory of evolution which derives the mind of man as well as his body from the animals below him, and so, in looking at animals in their home life, he expects to see at work the same tendencies and possibilities which have reached their fulfil- ment in the human intellect as we know it. He finds the beginnings of all sorts of human manners and capabilities; the rudiments of speech, of musical sense, of the making of a home, decoration and amusements, elementary systems of sanitation, the adoption of laws of marriage and of property, and the bases even of the morality which found its eventual expression in the Ten Commandments. In the range or home-region of an animal he sees parallels with the growth of territorial law among mankind. In the choice and per- sistent selection of food is the beginning of all property rights. The habit of storing food which belongs to most animals except the horned ruminants comes from the same origin as human frugality. The community of the beaver is " patriarchal rather than domestic." In the home-life, again, of animals the relation to that of human beings offers resemblances which could hardly be mere coincidences ; the higher in the scale of creation, the stronger the tendency to monogamy and to the maintenance of a family circle. The more elaborate the home, the greater the necessity for keep- ing it clean; hence the strict cleanliness of the badgers, the gophers' dry earth-closets, and the communal middenheaps of other animals, such as voles. Vice, crime, and the idea of suicide are even further developments of the "little mind" along parallels with human morality ; the main instances which Mr. Seton chooses are the killing of their young by parents, self-mutilation by monkeys and parrots, and breaches of laws of honour among animals which human beings might think of as thieves, such as rats. And so on; we may not follow Mr. Seton in all his deductions, but he is careful to keep facts and theories apart, and we can sift his evidence as we please.
But the main part of the two volumes, of course, consists of the setting down of actually recorded observation of the sixty different species of Manitoban mammals, from the wapiti and the moose to the smallest of pigmy shrews. We turn to the moose, and find records of migrations apparently regular, but never yet wholly explained; we read of rats and mice, and learn what may be news to some, that the common • We. ffistories of Northern Animals: an Account of the Mammals of Manitoba. fly Ernest Thompson &too. With 68 ?daps and 560 Drawings by the Author. 2 cols. London : Constable and Co. V.43 13s. Cd. net.] rat Plus Norvegicus) has not yet succeeded in establishing itself in Manitoba. Some very interesting pages are devoted to the disappearance of the buffalo from the American prairies ; the short answer to all lamenting over the destruction of those noble herds is that " it was absolutely inevitable." The buffalo occupied the plains which were needed by the overcrowded humanity of Europe. "Producing buffalo was not the best use to which those plains could be put." But it is interesting to note the order in which Mr. Seton classifies the enemies which as a fact brought about the extermination of the great herds. In inverse order of importance, the natural enemies of the buffalo were " blizzards, wolves, prairie fires, bogs, the Indian, and rivers." Even the Indian, driving the herds before him over precipices, did not destroy them as the rivers melting from solid ice to a breaking surface destroyed them every spring. In the opening years of the nineteenth century the traveller would meet a drowned herd which " formed one continuous line in the current for two days and nights "; and that drowning by tens of thousands happened year after year. The advent of the rifle merely hastened the end; but would it be logical, after all, to regard the process by which the Indian arrow and the rifle ended the buffalo as anything else but the working of a law of Nature P We are too much inclined, perhaps, to connect the workings of laws of Nature with processes which seem to be, but are not, more "natural," such as extermination by disease. Disease, for instance, ended the rabbits which swarmed in the south-western half of Winnipeg in 1886. To so astonishing an extent had rabbits multiplied in that summer that farmers began to wonder whether their future was to be that of the Australian farmer. A moderate calculation assessed the rabbit population at a hundred millions. And then, in a single winter, plague flecked the countryside white with dead bodies ; the entire " population " vanished. Yet which is the more natural,—the extinction of numbers by diseases of over- crowding, or by the simple but inexorable law of the survival of the fittest P It would be strange if a book such as this, containing the personal experience of thirty years, did not chronicle some queer incidents and ask some puzzling questions. If any naturalist wished to select a test case to measure the qualities of animal reasoning, could he do better than choose the custom of the coyote when hunting antelope, which is to take up the chase by relays of two coyotes at a time, stationed at intervals on the probable line of flight ? Or what could begin a new American Tungle Book better than the story told by Mr. Seton of a friendship between a Manitoban badger and a lost boy P The boy, seven years old, somehow found his way into a badger-hole; the badger fought him for the occupation of it, could not turn him out, and eventually brought him food which it shared with him in the hole. The boy was rescued after two weeks, much scratched, but alive, and he wept bitterly at being separated from his savage friend. But perhaps the best of the actual puzzles set American naturalists to decipher lately was that of the " tiny, hoofed quadruped of unknown species" whose tracks were discovered along the muddy bank of the Dela- ware River, Pennsylvania, in the autumn of 1905. The feet of this animal " were smaller than those of the smallest African gazelle; each track being less than the tip of a little finger; the stride was two inches, the straddle a little over an inch." Day after day revealed no solution of the mystery ; but at last the animal was accommodating enough to be caught in a trap and to leave a leg behind it. Then it was discovered to be nothing more than an abnormal musk-rat, whose central toes had developed extraordinarily broad claws which were in fact hoofs! Mr. Seton has examined and made a drawing of the foot, but the animal itself has never been seen.
It is difficult to conceive of a task of thirty years more admirably carried out than this natural history of the animals of North America, with its twelve hundred pages of observa- tion and suggested theory, and the charming drawings from life which alternate with scientific diagrams and well-thought.. out maps illustrating areas of distribution of species. Mr. Seton's book, merely because of its price, may not reach the library of every naturalist who would wish to possess it, but it must claim its place on the shelves of all libraries of standing, not only as a storehouse of pleasure and learning, but as a volume of reference which takes its rank at once as a classic.
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