Nothing like this type of book was written until within the last century and a half. Books of this kind can only be produced in a refined, cultivated, civilized society. In rude societies there may be much appreciation of outdoor life, much fierce joy in hunting, much longing for adventurous wandering, but the appreciation and joy are inarticulate; for in such societies the people who write are generally not the people who act, and they express emotions by words as conventional as Egyptian hieroglyphics. In the popular poetry which has come down to us from early times, in the ballads of Britain and France, and the folk songs of the Russian and Turkish steppes, there are occasional lines which bring before us the song birds in Spring, in the merry greenwood, or the great flocks of water fowl on the ponds of the plains of green grass; but they are merely a few words of incidental description of the land through which the hero rides to foray and battle. We do not pass much beyond this stage even with Chaucer and the Minnesingers; and although the heroes of the Nibelungenlied were mighty hunters, those who described their deeds knew nothing of the game, even of their own forests. There were sovereigns of Nineveh whose devotion to the bolder forms of the chase was a passion; and Kings and Queens of Memphis and Thebes who with absorbed and intelligent curiosity sought for information about the life of far-off lands; but their laborious writings, if they did not deal with business contracts, were generally concerned only with boastful annals or religious ritual. Hitherto there have been only two periods of Western history in which both the art of expression, and the breadth of interest among cultivated men, grew to a point which permitted the cultivated man to turn back to the life of the open which his inarticulate ancestor had gradually abandoned, and to enjoy, appreciate, and describe it. One of these periods included the society which enjoyed Theocritus and the society which applauded the country poems of Virgil. The other includes our own time, and may roughly be said to have begun when the rise of writers like Pope showed that English eighteenth century society had at last regained the level of the ancient society which enjoyed Cicero and Horace and Pliny; in France the advance had been more rapid. It was not until the end of the eighteenth century that there appeared (in primitive form, of course, as with all early types) "nature books" and books of natural history, big game hunting and adventures in out-of-the-way lands. In the Middle Ages there had been many "beastiaries," in which the natural history was for the most part fabulous; and many French and German, and some Italian, Spanish, and English hunting books, which were for the most part as stiff and technical as treatises on farriery.