to breed more and more to the color that afforded them most protection.

I may mention with deference that I do not think you have made the most of (Page 49) the similarity between our British red grouse and the Norwegian species: I have shot many thousands of British grouse and many hundreds of Norwegian Ripas, and may therefore be permitted to express my opinion viz. that not the smallest doubt exists on my mind as to their being merely “strongly marked varieties” of the same species—the difference in plumage being caused by the necessity for the British grouse to assimilate his plumage to the color of brown heath, whereas the Norwegian Dal-ripa must more resemble grey rocks, birch-bushes (and snow in the winter) in order to protect his life from the numerous hawks, gulls, and ravens frequenting that country: these birds exactly resemble one-another in their size, their voice, their flight, and their general habits: and I have a few times killed a British grouse so white as exactly to resemble an accidentaly rather dark Dal-Ripa.

I suppose no one will pretend that there is any specific difference between the British ptarmigan and the “fjëld-ripa” or hill-ptarmigan of Norway? or between the Blackcocks of either country? Only, because the “fjëld-ripa” frequents the high, grey, rocky mountains as does the Scottish Ptarmigan; and the Blackcocks of both countries inhabit the wooded valleys—there is no necessity for any alteration of plumage in them.

I entertain no doubt that if a number of Dal-Ripas were taken over and liberated on a well-preserved Scottish moor, they would in the course of a few generations come to resemble the indigenous red grouse, or vice versa.

I may mention a curious instance of the hereditary propensities of birds which is notorious in this district of Argyleshire: it is well-known that for ages the grouse on the extensive moors of Ayrshire and Renfrewshire have always been very “wild’—far more so than on this side of the Firth of Clyde: now some 20 years ago a neighbour of mine, thinking to improve the breed, introduced a few brace of Lowland grouse into this district, and in a very few years a marked increase of wildness took place among the grouse for many miles around, and throughout the district of Cowal I fancy they are now as wild as in the Lowland Counties, whereas in Cantyre on the opposite shore of Loch-Fyne they are still comparatively tame.

Your remarks about an ”over-stock of “game” causing epidemics² will be fully borne out by any observant game-preserver or any intelligent gamekeeper.

I have no doubt that the grouse-disease so prevalent in Scotland for 13 or 14 years back was caused by nothing else than high preservation (aided by 2 or 3 wonderfully favorable breeding seasons consecutively) having got up a stock of grouse which the soil was unable to supply with a sufficiency of something essential to their existence: I have always suspected that this something was insects: it clearly was not for want of heather as has been nonsensically written, because in 1846–47 when it commenced there was heather enough to have kept all the grouse in Cowal on this estate, and yet they were dying in hundreds. It may be worthy of observation that during that winter of ”46–”47 the grouse in this district first commenced the practice of coming down to the stubble-fields and low grounds as if in quest of something wh. they could not find in sufficient quantities on the hills: they have ever since more or less continued that habit, but previous to ’46 it was unknown in this district.

Your illustration of the Magpie (Page 212) as showing the hereditary tendency of birds to become tame or wild, is a very happy one, as no bird is so much persecuted in Britain, whereas in Norway the people have a superstition that it is “unlucky” to touch them and they are consequently so audaciously tame as to sit on the houses.

It is a common remark all over Britain that “game is becoming much wilder’: this seems to me very easy of explanation when we consider that formerly the greatest danger to game-birds was from hawks and their greatest security from them lay in cowering as much as possible, but now from the gradual extermination of hawks &c and from the frequency of shooters and goodness of guns, their principal danger is from the latter, and they are no doubt gradually finding out from generation to generation that their best mode of security is to fly off whenever they see a man.

I have passed the last two summers in hunting in Spitzbergen and the great ice-fields lying around it:³ I shot 100 Reindeer there, and I am almost certain that many of these Deer had never seen a human being in their lives before, because there were some so ridiculously tame as to come up—even to windward—to look