The natural features of Devonshire are so varied in character, including as they do large areas of wild and uncultivated and thinly-inhabited country, together with many well-wooded and sequestered valleys, and wide stretches of bog, salt-marsh, and sea-coast, that it is very rich in both animal and vegetable life. Its marine fauna and flora, in particular, are of very great interest, and are among the most remarkable in England. [Illustration: A Red Deer] Nearly all the native mammals of the British Isles are found or have been found in this county, from the "tall red deer" that has run wild on Exmoor from time immemorial, down to the pygmy shrew, the smallest but one of European quadrupeds, and weighing only one-tenth of an ounce, or about forty-three grains and a half. [Illustration: Otters] Among the eight species of Devonshire bats is the very rare particoloured bat (_Vesperugo discolor_), of which the only example ever recorded in England was taken at Plymouth, having perhaps travelled there in the rigging of a ship. It is probably more than a hundred years since the last genuine wild-cat was seen in the county, but both the marten and the polecat still survive in secluded spots. Foxes are common, and there are still many badgers in some of the Dartmoor valleys, where the two species have been known to inhabit the same holt. Otters abound on all the principal streams, and are as regularly hunted as the red deer and the fox. Devonshire is, indeed, pre-eminent for its otter-hunting, and the Culmstock pack is believed to be the oldest in the island. Harvest mice and dormice, although widely distributed, are not numerous, and the original English black rat is now rare. Among the many marine mammalia that have been recorded for the county are two kinds of seal, the sperm-whale, the common rorqual--of which specimens nearly 70 feet long have been brought into Plymouth--the rare bottle-nosed dolphin and the still rarer Risso's grampus. Bones of a whale called _Balaenoptera robustus_, which were once washed ashore in Torbay, are said to represent a species so rare that these and a few similar relics stranded in Sweden are the only remains of it that have ever been found. Situated as Devonshire is, between the English and the Bristol Channels, and containing widely-different physical features, suited to the needs of species of very different habits, the list of its birds, including residents, migrants, occasional visitors, and stragglers from the Atlantic and even from America, is a very long one.