I have not read Ernest Thompson Seton's Wild Animals I
Have Known or its companion volumes, and I should consider it iconoclasm to throw doubt on their veracity myself. But Mr. Bergen Evans, an American writer who devotes his book, The Natural History of Nonsense* to the task of exploding error in order to establish truth suffers from no such inhibitions. Mr. Seton tells of a vixen which, when her cub was caught in a trap, "brought the innocent little one a piece of poisoned bait that it might die rather than live in captivity." Mr. Evans says in effect "Rats," and I am bound to say I don't blame him. Mr. Seton relates (on the authority of a Canadian Arch- bishop) the story of a boy adopted by a badger ; Mr. Evans' scepticism is equally crude. Other people write vivid stories of wolves that hunt in packs and eat men. Mr. Evans quotes high authority in support of his contention that wolves do neither the one nor the other. We shall be told next that the whale didn't swallow Jonah. Oddly enough, Mr. Evans says it could have.
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