The main strains from which most of the best of the present-day breeds of bulls come, directly or through various crossings, are those of Vasquez, Cabrera, Vista Hermosa, Saavedra, Lesaca and Ibarra.

The breeders who furnish the best bulls to-day are the sons of Pablo Romero of Sevilla, the Conde de Santa Coloma of Madrid, Conde de la Corte of Badajoz, Doña Concepcion de la Concha y Sierra of Sevilla, daughter of the famous widow of Concha y Sierra; Doña Carmen de Federico, of Madrid, present owner of the Murube breed; the sons of Don Eduardo Miura of Sevilla, Marques de Villamarta of Sevilla, Don Argimiro Perez Tabernero, Don Gracialano Perez Tabernero and Don Antonio Perez Tabernero, all of Salamanca; Don Francisco Sanchez of Coquilla in the province of Salamanca, Don Florentino Sotomayor of Cordoba, Don José Pereira Palha of Villafranca de Xifra, Portugal, the widow of Don Felix Gomez of Colmenar Viejo, Doña Enriqueta de la Cova of Sevilla, Don Felix Moreno Ardanuy of Sevilla, Marques de Albayda of Madrid, and Don Julian Fernandez Martinez of Colmenar Viejo, who owns the old breed of Don Vicente Martinez.

There is not a word of conversation in the chapter, Madame, yet we have reached the end. I'm very sorry.

No sorrier than I am, sir.

What would you like to have? More major truths about the passions of the race? A diatribe against venereal disease? A few bright thoughts on death and dissolution? Or would you care to hear the author's experience with a porcupine during his earliest years spent in Emmett and Charlevoix counties in the state of Michigan?

Please, sir, no more about animals to-day.

What do you say to one of those homilies on life and death that delight an author so to write?

I cannot truly say I want that either. Have you not something of a sort I've never read, amusing yet instructive? I do not feel my best to-day.

Madame, I have the very thing you need. It's not about wild animals nor bulls. It's written in popular style and is designed to be the Whittier's Snow Bound of our time and at the end it's simply full of conversation.

If it has conversation in it I would like to read it.

Do so then, it's called -------

Old lady: I don't care for the title.

Author: I didn't say you would. You may very well not like any of it. But here it is:

It has always seemed to me that the war has been omitted as a field for the observations of the naturalist. We have charming and sound accounts of the flora and fauna of Patagonia by the late W. H. Hudson; the Reverend Gilbert White has written most interestingly of the Hoopoe on its occasional and not at all common visits to Selborne and Bishop Stanley has given us a valuable, although popular, Familiar History of Birds. Can we not hope to furnish the reader with a few rational and interesting facts about the dead? I hope so.

When that persevering traveller, Mungo Park, was at one period of his course fainting in the vast wilderness of an African desert, naked and alone, considering his days as numbered and nothing appearing to remain for him to do but to lie down and die, a small moss-flower of extraordinary beauty caught his eye. "Though the whole plant," says he, "was no larger than one of my fingers, I could not contemplate the delicate conformation of its roots, leaves and capsules without admiration. Can that Being who planted, watered and brought to perfection, in this obscure part of the world, a thing which appears of so small importance, look with unconcern upon the situation and suffering of creatures formed after his own image? Surely not. Reflections like these would not allow me to despair; I started up and, disregarding both hunger and fatigue, travelled forward, assured that relief was at hand; and I was not disappointed."

With a disposition to wonder and adore in like manner, as Bishop Stanley says, can no branch of Natural History be studied without increasing that faith, love and hope which we also, every one of us, need in our journey through the wilderness of life? Let us therefore see what inspiration we may derive from the dead.

In war the dead are usually the male of the human species although this does not hold true with animals, and I have frequently seen dead mares among the horses. An interesting aspect of war, too, is that it is only there that the naturalist has an opportunity to observe the dead of mules. In twenty years of observation in civil life I had never seen a dead mule and had begun to entertain doubts as to whether these animals were really mortal. On rare occasions I had seen what I took to be dead mules, but on close approach these always proved to be living creatures who seemed to be dead through their quality of complete repose. But in war these animals succumb in much the same manner as the more common and less hardy horse.

Old lady: I thought you said it wasn't about animals.

Author: It won't be for long. Be patient, can't you? It's very hard to write like this.

Most of those mules that I saw dead were along mountain roads or lying at the foot of steep declivities whence they had been pushed to rid the road of their encumbrance. They seemed a fitting enough sight in the mountains where one was accustomed to their presence and looked less incongruous there than they did later, at Smyrna, where the Greeks broke the legs of all their baggage animals and pushed them off the quay into the shallow water to drown. The numbers of broken-legged mules and horses drowning in the shallow water called for a Goya to depict them. Although, speaking literally, one can hardly say that they called for a Goya since there has only been one Goya, long dead, and it is extremely doubtful if these animals, were they able to call, would call for pictorial representation of their plight but, more likely, would, if they were articulate, call for some one to alleviate their condition.

Old lady: You wrote about those mules before.

Author: I know it and I'm sorry. Stop interrupting. I won't write about them again. I promise.

Regarding the sex of the dead it is a fact that one becomes so accustomed to the sight of all the dead being men that the sight of a dead woman is quite shocking. I first saw inversion of the usual sex of the dead after the explosion of a munition factory which had been situated in the countryside near Milan, Italy. We drove to the scene of the disaster in trucks along poplar-shaded roads, bordered with ditches containing much minute animal life, which I could not clearly observe because of the great clouds of dust raised by the trucks. Arriving where the munition plant had been, some of us were put to patrolling about those large stocks of munitions which for some reason had not exploded, while others were put at extinguishing a fire which had gotten into the grass of an adjacent field, which task being concluded, we were ordered to search the immediate vicinity and surrounding fields for bodies. We found and carried to an improvised mortuary a good number of these and, I must admit, frankly, the shock it was to find that these dead were women rather than men. In those days women had not yet commenced to wear their hair cut short, as they did later for several years in Europe and America, and the most disturbing thing, perhaps because it was the most unaccustomed, was the presence and, even more disturbing, the occasional absence of this long hair. I remember that after we had searched quite thoroughly for the complete dead we collected fragments. Many of these were detached from a heavy, barbed-wire fence which had surrounded the position of the factory and from the still existent portions of which we picked many of these detached bits which illustrated only too well the tremendous energy of high explosive. Many fragments we found a considerable distance away in the fields, they being carried farther by their own weight. On our return to Milan I recall one or two of us discussing the occurrence and agreeing that the quality of unreality and the fact that there were no wounded did much to rob the disaster of a horror which might have been much greater. Also the fact that it had been so immediate and that the dead were in consequence still as little unpleasant as possible to carry and deal with made it quite removed from the usual battlefield experience. The pleasant, though dusty, ride through the beautiful Lombard countryside also was a compensation for the unpleasantness of the duty and on our return, while we exchanged impressions, we all agreed that it was indeed fortunate that the fire which broke out just before we arrived had been brought under control as rapidly as it had and before it had attained any of the seemingly huge stocks of unexploded munitions. We agreed too that the picking up of the fragments had been an extraordinary business; it being amazing that the human body should be blown into pieces which exploded along no anatomical lines, but rather divided as capriciously as the fragmentation in the burst of a high explosive shell.