Save for the grand air and the glorious scenery, ptarmigan are hardly worth the trouble of climbing for. Nor is the actual sport much more exhilarating than that of the drive which is matter of sheer necessity for thinning the innumerable mountain hares that puzzle the dogs and aggravate the sportsmen. The best that can be said of the hares is that they come in convenient for soup. But if you chance to have stretches of copse wood on the low ground, the roes can be turned to excellent account. The Baron of Bradwardine was wrong for once when he asserted that the roe was never in pride of grease, for in the autumn they are the fatter and the finer, and much depends on the summer feed. The Highland roe is surpassed by those of the Continent, who doze through the day in sheltered woods and roam out at morn and eve among the cattle in verdant meadows. There is no better dish in a German hotel than the small saddle or Rehrücke, with white, piquant sauce, if you can persuade the cook to keep it long enough. But when I used to put up at a lodge in a famous deer-forest in Ross-shire for salmonfishing, before the harts or yeld hinds had come into season, there was no joint we appreciated more than a shoulder of roe stewed with carrots, and served with a claret sauce. The flavour of game always depends on the diet, and pheasants from the hills are infinitely preferable to birds turned out of coops in the home coverts. As Hayward remarks in his 'Art of Dining,' the partridges from the grasslands of the Shires are not to be compared with their cousins from the fertile wheat counties. So those who are only acquainted with park-fed venison have never realised the possibilities of the fallow deer. I have shot them and eaten them when they had broken bounds and run wild for a generation or two with the roes in the Inverness-shire woods. Then one might say, with Dumas's Swiss landlord who recommended the bear steak of the man-eater: Goûtez ça et vous m'en direz nouvelles.' It would be blasphemy to say anything against the haunch or neck of a prime yeld hind from Athol, Badenoch, or the Black Mount. Yet it is permissible to regret the deficiency of the fat, the distribution of which is the trouble of the epicure carving the fallow haunch. That is corrected by enclosing the wild deer in a southern park; but unfortunately nothing in this world is perfection, and you lose in savour what you gain in grease.

On the Continent the herds of wild swine range the forests among the roe and red deer, and in the south especially the tame pigs are turned loose in the woods to gorge themselves with the

acorns, chestnuts, and beech-mast. Consequently in these favoured lands the pork is always delectable, and the hams, when carefully cured, approach perfection. When I wintered at Sorrento, perforce we chiefly lived upon pork, and the sole complaint was that it palled after a time. The torrid Spanish peninsula is proverbial for poor living, but the charms of the Spanish swine are scarcely to be overrated. Everywhere the shreds of pork are the foundation of the succulent puchero. Never on the Continent have I seen a loin or a leg till it had been salted, spiced, and smoked. The choicest Spanish hams are those of Estremadura and Andalusia. Ford says that the pigs of the country round Chiclana have the finishing touch put to them by a snake diet. I know not how that may be, but personally I give the palm to the Portuguese hams; possibly because I have judged them under exceptionally favourable conditions. I have tried them at the table of Senhor Martinez, of the great Oporto house, where the accompaniment was old and unadulterated port. And a Scottish wine merchant in regular relations with Lisbon and Oporto used to make the consignment of a batch of the hams from Entre-Minho-e-Douro or the Algarve the occasion of little dinners, where Leoville or La Rose led on through the olives to the Lafitte and Château Margaux. We hear little now of the hams of Bayonne, and Westphalia would seem to have fallen out of the running with the opening of coalfields and the starting of ironworks; and how is it that the distressful country beats England out of the field, for neither York nor Devon, nor even the Bradenhams, can hold their own with Cork or Limerick ?

The connoisseur in mutton has an ample home choice. The mountains and moors of the British Isles for five-year-old mutton against the world. There is little to choose between the blackfaced of the Welsh, the Scotch, or the Cumberland hills. As a rule, the smaller the sheep, the sweeter the mutton-bred in the bitter blasts and fattened in the sheltered vales-the breed of sheep John Ridd tucked under either arm when he carried home the survivors of his flocks from the drifts of the memorable and fatal snowstorm. For Dartmoor and Exmoor are not behind the Vale of Llangollen and the sheepwalks of the far North. I do not know that any restaurant in London now makes a speciality of tiny joints of the black-faced, though I could send the reader to a shop in Fleet Street where Exmoor and Dartmoor are always on sale. The innocent French, who know no better, make much of their pré salé, from the sheep on their south-eastern salt

marshes. It is good enough when you can get no better, and I have often enjoyed it at the Hôtel de France or the Paris of Bordeaux. Though there it was thrown into the shade by three local delicacies the cèpes, or great, rich, fleshy mushrooms; the royans, the delicate sardines of the Gironde; and the foies de canards sauvages aux olives, which peremptorily claimed the chasse of old Cognac. As for the gigots of the Pyrenees, they would have been beyond praise for the hungry pedestrian if they had not been invariably bedevilled with saturation of garlic; of course, a single clove in the knuckle is de rigueur in every well-conducted kitchen. At the Trois Frères Provençaux in Paris, and the Café Voisin, they imported Gascon tradition into the Parisian cuisine, and the poitrine de mouton, a favourite morning plat at the Voisin, was a thing to remember, for the sauce Béarnaise. There the garlic, as another condiment in Sydney Smith's metrical recipe for a salad dressing, lurking, scarce suspected, permeated the whole. The mutton of the East much resembles goat, yet it is savoury when stewed with rice in the pilau. Never in my life was I so constrained by civility to stuff as at the festivities at Ismailia, at the opening of the Suez Canal. One day we had breakfasted copiously at the villa of M. de Lesseps; thence we adjourned for late luncheon to the pavilions of the Khedive, where the cutlets, cooked in the open at the desert fires, detestably smoked over halfgreen wood, were made palatable by libations of the rarest brands of Roederer or Veuve Clicquot. We had coffee and cognac, and fondly fancied we had closed gastronomic accounts for the time, when we were persuaded to get up on camels for a round of the tents of the Bedouins. But not a bit of it. Sheikh after hospitable sheikh we found seated, in waiting, behind the circular table with the great circular pilau dish. It would have been a deadly insult to decline the hospitality, and when the host plunged his hand in the platter and brought up a handful of the mess, it would have been ungracious not to grin and swallow it smilingly. We had gone in for the round of visits, and we went through with it. But mortal nature could not have stood the strain had not the Bedouin pilau been as savoury as the Khedive's cutlets were execrable, and, by the way, there were dates in it, as prunes in the cock-a-leekie; for the Orientals, like the Scots, have a sweet tooth they never lose. And there are other delicacies that both appreciate. When Fergus MacIvor welcomed Waverley to Glennaquoich, the hog in harst,' the lamb roasted whole, figured con

spicuously at the banquet. No Englishman in a sultry climate need wish a more insinuating pièce de résistance than the rosytinged lamb, stuffed with pistachio nuts, when served at the hospitable table of some wealthy Turk or Greek in Frankish Pera or in Stamboul.

The beef of Old England is as much a national institution as 'Rule Britannia' or right of free speech, and deserves better than to be flippantly brought in in a postscript. Yet even there Old England cannot have it all its own way. Sleek and shapely are the Shorthorns that fatten in the southern meads, but if not actually of Scottish birth, the race has developed by such scientific Scotch breeders as old Amos Cruickshank, the Quaker of Sitlyton, who has honourable mention in the pages of 'The Druid.' The blue-ribboned fat cattle at the Christmas shows come chiefly from Aberdeen or Forfar. Long after the Martinmas steers were slaughtered wholesale, and stored away in pickle for winter consumption, the most aristocratic of our ancestors were far from fastidious. And many a memorable sea fight from behind the old wooden walls was won by our mariners on junk as hard and highly polished as the best solid mahogany. But it is to be feared the digestions of all classes have been weakening. There are still houses in the City, and there is one in Cork Street, which rest their reputation on the steak, but the steak and silver gridiron clubs of Covent Garden are no longer the rallying-centres for select coteries of men illustrious in statecraft, in literature, and in fashion, who drained the tankard and drenched themselves in old crusted port in defiance of the gout and the morning's reflections. The French filet, à la Chateaubriand or with other refinements of the culinary art, is far more in favour; but though it should come from the undercut, the choicest of the sirloin, on this side of the Channel it is too often a gross imposition. In my opinion, the undercut is better cold than hot, with a self-compounded sauce of mustard, ketchup, shalots, horseradish, and finely sliced carrot. But for myself, and of all things, give me the small spiced round of 'hunter's beef' from the shaggy black Highlander, brought down from the green corries of his native hills to have the finishing touches in Strathearn or Strathtay. Nor is there the haunting sense of evanescent enjoyment, as with the bitter of the grouse back or the trail of the woodcock, for with that round you may cut and come again indefinitely.

ALEXANDER INNES SHAND.

WILD ANIMALS AS PARENTS.

BY GEORGE A. B. DEWAR.

DARWIN once said that it gave him a 'cold shudder' to reflect that the eye must be included among the parts of living creatures which have reached their present state by natural selection. Sir Henry Holland was scandalised when the theory was broached to him, but found consolation in the exquisitely contrived bones of the ear: they at any rate, he said, were beyond all reasonable suspicion. It is hard to imagine the eye, that visible master touch in the cosmography of man, evolving through unthinkable ages out of some shapeless pulp into its present form. But the eye, after all, is only a window. It is when the uncompromising natural selectionist says that the mind and spirit which look out through the window have come the same way, that men may shudder with Darwin and Holland. Even setting aside man-'that amphibious piece between a corporeal and spiritual essence, . . . the breath and similitude of God,' as Browne defines him—it is not easy to feel satisfied with the theory that the high and curious intelligence, and often the beautiful affections, ofthe lower animals' have come about solely by the agency of natural selection. Since I began to write this article a book called 'Doubts about Darwinism,' by a semi-Darwinian,' has appeared, which touches on the matter. The theory of natural selection, urges the writer, does not account for the way in which the care of animals for their offspring arose. He refers in particular to the precautions taken by two insects, a sexton beetle and one of the sphexes, for the future welfare of their young. The case of the various sphexes is perhaps the most amazing in natural history, but it is by no means the most touching. She digs a long passage, and forms at the end several chambers, in each of which she lays an egg. Then she goes out and captures a caterpillar or a cricket. She does not kill the prey outright-which she could with ease-but paralyses it by stinging it in a carefully selected and non-vital part. In each chamber she places a paralysed insect, which will linger on alive