of raw fowl (which he had torn asunder, feathers and all,) with as much avidity as Sir Robert Peel devours our incomes.

Should Mr. Wighton read this paper, he cannot fail to perceive that I have many serious obstacles to overcome, before I can arrive at the very important conclusion, that the family of squirrel is carnivorous in its own native haunts.

GIGANTIC RASPBERRIES

WHEN I altered Walton Hall, I destroyed the finest garden, for its size, in Yorkshire. But there was no help for it. I was absolutely forced to turn Vandal, and blot it out from the face of the earth. The raspberries in it always grew to the height of fourteen feet. Situation caused this growth. I once, in my rambles in Lancashire, fell in with a like situation, and there I found wild raspberries growing fully as high. To obtain this luxuriant growth, the situation must be low and rich; and the rasp

berry plants must be shielded from the noonday sun by trees, or a high wall. Trees, I should say, would be better. We had always wooden. steps on purpose to reach the fruit. My father sent plants of these raspberries to his friends in Yorkshire, and in the county of Nottingham, but they answered not the expectations which had been formed of them. When I destroyed the garden, I saved a sufficient quantity of plants to be cultivated elsewhere. They are still in existence, and their puny growth informs me that I must never more expect to see them in their former luxuriance. When I removed the soil on which they had flourished so suprisingly, I found stony fragments at the bottom, through which there ran a stream of water which got vent from the mouth of a drain at the opposite side of the garden.

THE CAYMAN.

"The crocodile, in fact, is only dangerous when in the water. Upon land it is a slow-paced and even timid animal; so that an active boy armed with a small hatchet might easily dispatch one. There is no great prowess therefore required to ride on the back of a poor cayman after it has been secured or perhaps wounded; and a modern writer might well have spared the recital of his feats in this way upon the cayman of Guiana, had he not been influenced in this and numberless other instances, by the greatest possible love of the marvellous, and a constant propensity to dress truth in the garb of fiction."-Extract from Lardner's Cabinet Cyclopedia; Fishes, vol. ii. p. 111.

SWAINSON, Wholesale dealer in closet-zoology, was never in the wilds of Guiana, where the book of Wanderings was written. Hence any comment on the above extract were loss of labour and of time.

His erroneous account of the cayman at once shows me that he never saw this animal in its native haunts.

I stop not here to tell the world how I came to incur the hostility of this morbid and presumptuous man. Suffice it to say, that formerly, in friendship (for I personally knew his worthy father), I used to give him ornitholo

gical information. But his behaviour was such that I found myself under the absolute necessity of discontinuing my correspondence with him and this laid the foundation of that animosity which at last has induced him publicly to call in question my veracity, without fortifying his rash act with any proof whatever. Let me here inform this dealer in unsound Zoology, that my veracity is the only article upon which I feel that I have a positive right to plume myself, in the two small volumes which I have presented to the world. And now for the cayman; first apologising to the reader for this disagreeable though necessary prologue.

Those who have had no opportunity of examining the crocodile and cayman in the regions where they are found, may form a tolerably correct notion of them (making a due allowance for size) by an inspection of the little lizard which inhabits the warmer parts of Europe. And should they not have it in their power to travel out of England, they may still acquire a competent idea of these animals by looking at the newt, which is common in most of our gardens: for, notwithstanding the

frivolous objections which Swainson has offered to the contrary, I consider these monsters of tropical climates neither more nor less than lizards of an extraordinary size, and in this the Spaniards agree with me;-for on their first arrival in the New World, seeing that the cayman was an overgrown lizard, both in form and habits, they called it "una lagarta," which is the Spanish name for a lizard.

The British, in course of time, having seized on the settlements formed by the Spaniards, soon became acquainted with the cayman, and on hearing the Spaniards exclaim “una lagarta” when this animal made its appearance, they, in their turn, called it an alligator; for so the two Spanish words, "una lagarta," sounded in the English ear. I got this information many years ago from a periodical of which I remember not the name.

The little lizard which darts at a fly on the sunny banks along the roads of Southern Europe, gives the spectator an excellent idea of the cayman in the act of taking its prey in the tropics; and whilst he views the pretty green creature turning sharply and quickly on the ground before him, he may see in ima