ls of Alma Mater and the Modern Athens,
enables them to attain a degree of vocal proficiency beyond the reach of
their rustic brethren in Yorkshire--and we hope ere long to hear of Mr
Waterton's having added a feathered professor of languages, from one or
other of these seats of learning, to the colony of barn-owls established
in the ruin of the old gateway at Walton.

Mr Waterton has never been famous for showing too much mercy to his
opponents in controversy--and, on the present occasion, the vials of his
wrath are poured forth without stint, though certainly not without strong
provocation, on the head of Mr Swainson, well known some years since as a
writer on natural history, and as one of the principal advocates of the
_Quinary System_[11]--a sort of zoological _transcendentalism_ (to borrow
a phrase from Kant and his disciples) then fashionable, according to which
all the genera and species of animals, known or hereafter to be
discovered, were held bound spontaneously to arrange themselves in
circular groups of _five_, neither more nor less, in obedience to some
intuitive principle of nature, of which the details were not yet very
clearly made out. It would appear that Mr Swainson, who is characterised
as a "morbid and presumptuous man," had been at variance--on personal as
well as scientific grounds--with Mr Waterton, from whom he received a
castigation for his ornithological heresies, in a letter published in
1837; but his retaliation was delayed for two years, when, in an account
of the cayman, published in Lardner's _Cabinet Cyclopaedia_, he describes
it as "on land 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;" and subsequently speaks of the cayman
as "so timid that, had we been disposed to perform such ridiculous feats,
our compassion for the poor animals would have prevented us." Mr Waterton
had no opportunity of replying to these offensive imputations at the time
they were published, being then absent in Italy, while Mr Swainson