We owe a real debt to the men who truthfully portray for us, with pen or pencil, any one of the many sides of outdoor life; whether they work as artists or as writers, whether they care for big beasts or small birds, for the 5 homely farmland or for the vast, lonely wilderness, whether they are scientists proper, or hunters of game, or lovers of all nature-which, indeed, scientists and hunters ought also to be. John Burroughs and John Muir, Stewart Edward White, and Frederic Remington, Olive 10 Thorne Miller, Hart Merriam, William Hornaday, Frank Chapman, J. A. Allen,° Ernest Ingersoll, Witmer Stone, William Cram, George Shiras-to all of these and to many like them whom I could name, we owe much, we who love the breath of the woods and the fields, and 15 who care for the wild creatures, large or small. And the surest way to neutralize the work of these lovers of truth and nature, of truth in nature-study, is to encourage those whose work shows neither knowledge of nature nor love of truth.

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The modern "nature faker" is of course an object of derision to every scientist worthy of the name, to every real lover of the wilderness, to every faunal naturalist, to every true hunter or nature lover. But it is evident that he completely deceives many good people who are 25 wholly ignorant of wild life. Sometimes he draws on his own imagination for his fictions; sometimes he gets them second-hand from irresponsible guides or trappers or Indians.

In the wilderness, as elsewhere, there are some persons 30 who do not regard the truth; and these are the very persons who most delight to fill credulous strangers with impossible stories of wild beasts. As for Indians, they live

in a world of mysticism, and they often ascribe supernatural traits to the animals they know, just as the men of the Middle Ages, with almost the same childlike faith, credited the marvels told of the unicorn, the basilisk, the roc, and the cockatrice.° . . . .

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It would take a volume merely to catalogue the comic absurdities with which the books of these writers are filled. There is no need of discussing their theories; the point is that their alleged "facts" are not facts at all, but fancies. Their most striking stories are not merely distortions of 10 facts, but pure inventions; and not only are they inventions, but they are inventions by men who know so little of the subject concerning which they write, and who to ignorance add such utter recklessness, that they are not even able to distinguish between what is possible, however 15 wildly improbable, and mechanical impossibilities. Be it remembered that I am not speaking of ordinary mistakes, of ordinary errors of observation, of differences of interpretation and opinion; I am dealing only with deliberate invention, deliberate perversion of fact.

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Now all this would be, if not entirely proper, at least far less objectionable, if the writers in question were content to appear in their proper garb, as is the case with the men who write fantastic fiction about wild animals for the Sunday issues of various daily newspapers. Moreover, 25 as a writer of spirited animal fables, avowed to be such, any man can gain a distinct place of some importance. But it is astonishing that such very self-evident fiction as that which I am now discussing should, when advertised as fact, impose upon any person of good sense, no matter 30 how ignorant of natural history and of wild life. Most of us have enjoyed novels like "King Solomon's Mines,"

for instance. But if Mr. Rider Haggard had insisted that his novels were not novels but records of actual fact, we should feel a mild wonder at the worthy persons who accepted them as serious contributions to the study of 5 African geography and ethnology.

It is not probable that the writers in question have even so much as seen some of the animals which they minutely describe. They certainly do not know the first thing about their habits, nor even about their physical structure. 10 Judging from the internal evidence of their books, I should gravely doubt if they had ever seen a wild wolf or a wild lynx. The wolves and lynxes and other animals which they describe are full brothers of the wild beasts that appear in "Uncle Remus" " and "Reynard the 15 Fox,'

," and deserve the same serious consideration from the zoological standpoint. Certain of their wolves appear as gifted with all the philosophy, the self-restraint, and the keen intelligence of, say, Marcus Aurelius, together with the lofty philanthropy of a modern altruist; though 20 unfortunately they are hampered by a wholly erroneous view of caribou anatomy.

Like the White Queen in "Through the LookingGlass," these writers can easily believe three impossible things before breakfast; and they do not mind in the least 25 if the impossibilities are mutually contradictory. Thus, one story relates how a wolf with one bite reaches the heart of a bull caribou, or a moose, or a horse-a feat which, of course, has been mechanically impossible of performance by any land carnivore since the death of the 30 last saber-toothed tiger. But the next story will cheerfully describe a doubtful contest between the wolf and a lynx or a bulldog, in which the latter survives twenty

slashing bites. Now of course a wolf that could bite into the heart of a horse would swallow a bulldog or a lynx like a pill.

In one story, a wolf is portrayed as guiding home some lost children, in a spirit of thoughtful kindness; let the 5 overtrustful individual who has girded up his loins to believe this think of the way he would receive the statement of some small farmer's boy that when lost he was guided home by a coon, a possum, or a woodchuck. Again, one of these story-book wolves, when starving, catches a red 10 squirrel, which he takes round as a present to propitiate a bigger wolf. If any man seriously thinks a starving wolf would act in this manner, let him study hounds when feeding, even when they are not starving.

The animals are alternately portrayed as actuated by 15 motives of exalted humanitarianism, and as possessed of demoniac prowess and insight into motive. In one story the fisher figures in the latter capacity. A fisher is a big marten, the size of a fox. This particular story-book fisher, when pursued by hunters on snow-shoes, kills a buck 20 by a bite in the throat, and leaves the carcass as a bribe to the hunters, hoping thereby to distract attention from himself! Now, foxes are continually hunted; they are far more clever than fishers. What rational man would pay heed to a story that a fox when hunted killed a good-sized 25 calf by a bite in the throat, and left it as a bribe to the hounds and hunters, to persuade them to leave him alone? One story is just as possible as the other.

In another story, the salmon is the hero. The writer begins by blunders about the young salmon which a ten 30 minutes' visit to any government fish hatchery would have enabled him to avoid; and as a climax, describes how

the salmon goes up a fall by flopping from ledge to ledge of a cliff, under circumstances which make the feat about as probable as that the fish would use a stepladder. As soon as these writers get into the wilderness, they develop 5 preternatural powers of observation, and, as Mr. Shiras says, become themselves "invisible and odorless," so that the shyest wild creatures permit any closeness of intimacy on their part; in one recent story about a beaver colony, the alternative to the above proposition is that the beavers 10 were both blind and without sense of smell.

Yet these same writers, who see such marvelous things as soon as they go into the woods, are incapable of observing aright the most ordinary facts when at home. One of their stories relates how the eyes of frogs shine at night 15 in the wilderness; the author apparently ignoring the fact that frog-ponds are common in less remote places, and are not inhabited by blazing-eyed frogs. Two of our most common and most readily observed small mammals are the red squirrel and the chipmunk. The chipmunk has 20 cheek pouches, in which he stores berries, grain, and small nuts, whereas the red squirrel has no cheek pouches, and carries nuts between his teeth. Yet even this simple fact escapes the attention of one of the writers we are discussing, who endows a red squirrel with cheek pouches 25 filled with nuts. Evidently excessive indulgence in invention tends to atrophy the power of accurate observation.

In one story a woodcock is described as making a kind of mud splint for its broken leg; it seems a pity not to have added that it also made itself a crutch to use while 30 the splint was on. A Baltimore oriole is described as making a contrivance of twigs and strings whereby to attach its nest, under circumstances which would imply the men