in the present volume the determination which he had
expressed in his former Essays, not to appear again before the public as
an author:--"It is time to say farewell, and to bid adieu to natural
history, as far as the press is concerned." But we still hope that he may
again be induced, on returning from Italy, whither we believe he has once
more bent his steps, by some other cause than the death of a valued
friend, to depart from this resolution. As he himself remarks with truth,
in the preface to his first series of Essays, "we can never expect to have
a complete history of birds, until he who undertakes the task of writing
it shall have studied his subject in the field of nature,"--and how little
this has been attended to even in the ornithology of our own country, is
sufficiently shown by the errors which, till of late, disfigured all the
received works on this subject, and have been copied with implicit faith
from one _soi-disant_ naturalist by another. Since that kindred spirit
Gilbert White, the first English naturalist who studied the habits of
living birds in the open air, instead of describing the colours of the
plumage of stuffed specimens in cabinets, we have had no one who has
investigated the economy of animals, and particularly of that most
beautiful class of the animal kingdom, the birds, so thoroughly _con
amore_ as Mr Waterton, in this and his preceding publications--identifying
himself (it may almost be said) with their _feelings_ and idiosyncrasies,
and vindicating them from the aspersions thrown upon them in the writings
of closet-naturalists, with the indignant zeal of a champion whose heart
and soul is in the cause of injured innocence. Those who saw the sloth
exhibited last summer in the Regent's Park Zoological Gardens, when at
large and suspended by its huge claws to the _under_ side of a branch of a
tree, must have recognised the minute accuracy of Mr Waterton's account,
in the _Wanderings_, of the habits of this animal, so much impugned at
the time, because diametrically opposed to the statements of zoologists
who had either never seen it alive, or seen it only when placed on a flat
surface, a position which it never assumes in its natural state, and which
its conformation renders one of extreme pain and constraint. Much
animadversion has also been lavished by writers of the same class on Mr
Waterton's sketches of British ornithology, as the facilities for
observation procured by the security aff