Something again from Rev. Mr. Higginson. In a narrative following the journal of his voyage, from which some selections have been made, he wrote for the information of his friends in England concerning the "earth of New England, and all the appurtenances thereof." The paragraphs containing what he had learned of the animals and birds of this region are interesting.

"For beasts, there are some bears, and they say some lions; for they have been seen at Cape Ann." (As to the lions, they were put in the woods of the Cape by the imagination of some timid persons. The writer had been misled by hearsay.) "Also here are several sorts of deer, some whereof bring three or four young ones at once, which is not ordinary in

England; also wolves, foxes, beavers, otters, martens, great wild-cats, and a great beast called a molke, as big as an ox." ("Molke" is probably a mistake of the printer for moose.) 66 "I have seen the skins of all these beasts since I came to this Plantation excepting lions. Also here are great store of squirrels, some greater, and some smaller and lesser; there are some of the lesser sort, they tell me, that by a certain skin will fly from tree to tree, though they stand far distant.”

"Fowls of the air are plentiful here, and of all ' sorts as we have in England, as far I can learn, and a great many of strange fowls, which we know not. Whilst I was writing these things, one of our men brought home an eagle which he had killed in the wood: they say they are good meat. Also here are many kinds of excellent hawks, both sea-hawks and land-hawks; and myself, walking in the woods with another in company, sprung a partridge so big that through the heaviness of his body could fly but a little way they that have killed them say that they are as big as our hens. Here are likewise abundance of turkeys, and exceeding fat, sweet, and fleshy; for here they have abundance of feeding all the year long, as strawberries (in summer all places are full of them) and all manner of berries and fruits. In the winter time I have seen flocks of pigeons, and have eaten of them. They do fly from tree to tree as other birds do, which pigeons will not do in England. They are of all colors, as

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ours are, but their wings and tails are longer; and therefore it is likely they fly swifter to escape the terrible hawks in this country. In winter time this country doth abound with wild geese, wild ducks, and other sea-fowl, that the great part of winter the planters have eaten nothing but roast meat of divers fowls which they have killed."

Of the animals mentioned by this clergyman of the olden time, only the red foxes, stone-martens, and some of the squirrels remain on the Cape. Long ago, the bears, moose, red deer, beavers, otters, wolves, and wild-cats were exterminated, or they retired from the increasing and spreading towns into the distant wilds of the north and northeast, where the White Hills keep ward over their woody retreats, or the upper rivulets of the Androscoggin, Kennebec, and Penobscot, reflecting the smile of heaven, meander through their dark range of shelter and subsistence. The foxes in our woods, being so few, are scarcely a terror to the ruffed grouse setting on her nest of eggs, or luring her chickens from under-brush and shade into sunny spots where the footpaths intersect. The stonemartens, though hunted and trapped every winter for their valuable fur, are still numerous on the sea-shore, where they have safe recesses, inaccessible hiding-places, and sinuous passages beneath the rocks, and where daily the constant tides bring to them fishes and crabs, and now and then small lobsters. The red and striped squirrels in the forest,

and near the cornfields, suddenly apprise the rambler that his coming is observed. The gray and flying squirrels are seldom seen. Beside these foxes, stone-martens, and squirrels, are two species of rabbits, more numerous, perhaps, than the stonemartens; the larger having their burrows in rocky and bush-covered steeps, around morasses thickly overgrown with alders; the smaller having theirs in the pastures, nearer the habitations of men, under the low branches of the dwarf white-oaks and the stunted yellow-pines. There are also, in different localities, musk-rats, weasels, moles, and other little quadrupeds, but not in numbers to occasion special remark.

But of the birds, or of their kinds, there is no diminution. Mr. Higginson did not write to his friends in England of the birds in the new land, serving in use and song instead of the sky-lark, nightingale, robin, starling, and linnet. But his oversight is not more remarkable than that of thousands to-day. It is not certain that every second or fourth or eighth person, meeting and conversing with his neighbor in the present time, in attempting to enumerate the different classes of land and water birds, would accomplish more than Mr. Higginson did. Even Dr. Palfrey, in his "History of New England," gives a surprisingly small list of birds. Hundreds of persons in every village or town, who know the robin, oriole, bluebird, cat-bird, blue-jay, wren, song-sparrow, chip

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