What Constitutes Evidence. The best evidence regarding the ways of wild animals is one's own eye-witness testimony. Not all second- hand observations are entirely accurate. Many persons do not know how to observe; and at times some are deceived by their own eyes or ears. It is a sad fact that both those organs are easily deceived. The student who is in doubt regarding the composition of evidence will do well to spend a few days in court listening to the trial of an important and hotly contested case. In collecting real evidence, all is not gold that glitters. Many a mind misinterprets the thing seen, sometimes innocently, and again wantonly. The nature fakir is always on the alert to see wonderful phenomena in wild life, about which to write; and by preference he places the most strained and marvellous interpretation upon the animal act. Beware of the man who always sees marvellous things in animals, for he is a dangerous guide. There is one man who claims to have seen in his few days in the woods more wonders than all the older American naturalists and sportsmen have seen added together. Now, Nature does not assemble all her wonderful phenomena and hold them in leash to be turned loose precisely when the great Observer of Wonders spends his day in the woods. Wise men always suspect the man who sees too many marvelous things. The Relative Value of Witnesses. It is due that a word should be said regarding "expert testimony" in the case of the wild animal. Some dust has been raised in this field by men posing as authorities on wild animal psychology, whose observations of the world's wild animals have been confined to the chipmunks, squirrels, weasels, foxes, rabbits, and birds dwelling within a small circle surrounding some particular woodland house. In another class other men have devoted heavy scientific labors to laboratory observations on white rats, domestic rabbits, cats, dogs, sparrows, turtles and newts as the handpicked exponents of the intelligence of the animals of the world! Alas! for the human sense of Proportion! Fancy an ethnologist studying the Eskimo, the Dog-Rib Indian, the Bushman, the Aino and the Papuan, and then proceeding to write conclusively "On the Intelligence of the Human Race." The proper place in which to study the minds, manners and morals of wild animals is in the most thickly populated haunts of the most intelligent species. The free and untrammeled animal, busily working out its own destiny unhindered by man, is the beau-ideal animal to observe and to study. Go to the plain, the wilderness, the desert and the mountain, not merely to shoot everything on foot, but to SEE _animals at home,_ and there use your eyes and your field-glass. See what _normal wild animals_ do as "behavior," and then try to find out why they do it.