and others held by the Committee. Such evidence is, as a rule, printed in full, and remains unheeded and unread in tons of neglected Blue-Books. Then again the money has been carefully and laboriously collected, for the Committee were precluded by the terms of their reference from drawing on the purse of the taxpayer. This also made for economy.
Some criticisms have been heard at the delay which has occurred in the production of this volume. But it should be remembered that when the Inquiry started very little was accurately known about the Grouse either in health or in disease. As a member of the Scientific Staff said in a lecture before the Royal Institution: "In considering exceptions it is so immensely important to know the rule. In studying disease our starting-point should be the normal, the healthy; yet until lately no one has closely studied the healthy Grouse, and indeed it is almost impossible to find a normal Grouse, i.e., one free from parasites. A Grouse cannot express to us its feelings; the state of its tongue, the rate of its pulse, even its temperature tell us nothing because we have no norm and no means of estimating the extent to which a diseased Grouse has departed from the standards of a healthy bird. The nature of the numerous kinds of blood corpuscles, which alter in proportion so markedly in animals when they become parasitised, was but a few months ago quite unknown, the "blood count" uninvestigated; in fact the Inquiry started, as regards the cause and symptoms of the diseases which affect Grouse, practically behind scratch."
Further, the Committee were not in a position to retain the whole time of any one of their Scientific Staff with the single exception of the Field Observer. What work this staff have accomplished, and they have accomplished much, has been for the most part done in their spare time or during their brief holidays. Another factor that made for delay was that the Committee were not in a position to establish a central laboratory, and hence the actual investigations were carried on for a time in one place, and then after a break often of many weeks the threads were picked up in another. Much work was done at Cambridge, but at the London School of Tropical Medicine, at the Royal Scottish Museum, Edinburgh, at Frimley, at King's School in the Isle of Man, in the offices of the Field in London, in the gun-room at Beaufort, valuable investigations were also carried on. Further, from the necessity of examining absolutely fresh material, an improvised travelling laboratory had to be set up perhaps in a private sitting-room of a country hotel, perhaps in an outhouse of a Highland inn, but always under conditions which vastly increased the difficulty of investigation, and made for delay.
