chiriyas, birds merely, and not one in fifty, save out-caste folk, can tell you anything of their habits, food, nests, or eggs. The most vague and incorrect statements are accepted and repeated without thought, a habit common to all populations, but more firmly rooted in India than elsewhere. First-hand observation and accurate statement of fact seem almost impossible to the Oriental, and education has not hitherto availed to help him. In the West public instruction becomes more real and vital year by year, but in the East it is still bound hand and foot to the corpse of a dead literature. Educational authorities in India discern the fault, but they are themselves mainly of the literary caste and direct native Professors whose passion is for words. We talk of science teaching, but forget to count with a national habit of mind that stands carefully aloof from facts and is capable of reducing the splendid suggestions of Darwin and Wallace, Faraday and Edison, to mechanical and inert rote work.

Indifference is intensified by the narrowness of sympathy produced by the caste system, and by the discouragement of attachment to animals among respectable people. Our modern school-books, in which lessons on animal life and humane animal treatment are wisely included, may do something in the course of time to lighten this "blind side" of Oriental character, and in a few generations we may hope for an Indian student of natural history. At present this splendid field is left entirely to European observers, who mostly look at nature along the barrel of a gun. Which is a false perspective.

I conclude that, while admitting the need for a legislative measure for the protection of animals, consonant with the wishes and feelings of the most cultivated classes in India, and of itself a sign of advancing civilisation and morality, it would be a task as difficult as hateful to prove that the people at large have any abnormal and inborn tendency to cruelty. The shadow of evil days of anarchy, disorder, and rapine has but lately cleared away and given place to an era of security, when, as the country proverb says, "the tiger and the goat drink at one ghât." The people are better than their creeds, but it is not easy to defend their practice, though it is often more due to necessity, custom, and ignorance than to downright brutality of intent.

To explain something of this in a familiar manner befitting an everyday, familiar subject is the purpose of this pen and pencil essay. It has seemed to me that an elementary study of Indian animals, their treatment and usage, and the popular estimates and sayings current about them, though involving much that is commonplace and trivial, opens a side door into Indian life, thought, and character, the threshold of which is still unworn.

To Anglo-Indians of long standing a word of apology is due for the apparent confidence with which native beliefs are treated. The truth is, it is hard to state briefly ideas of this nature without a seeming assumption of complete knowledge. But they will recognise the difficulty of translating nebulous Indian notions into stark English print, and make just allowances. We others know that only a fool will pretend to say with absolute confidence what a native thinks. Even in the West, where men think aloud, and the noisy newspaper proclaims the matter on the house-top, it takes a wise man to say how the popular mind is working.

India has a larger inheritance than most other countries in sacred and legendary lore of animals; but much of it has now only a literary interest, and but a remote connection with the actual life of the people. I have neither the scholarship nor the ambition to produce "one of those learned compilations which have no root in actual life, epitomise the past, and have no future." Serious students of Zoolatry and of folk-lore in its scientific sense will therefore find little to interest them in chapters wherein a living dog is frankly preferred to a dead lion.