Part 35

America, I may add, appears more keenly sensible of these advantages than we are. An American speculator had desired M. Auzoux to supply him yearly with two thousand copies of his figure of man, being certain of disposing of them in all the small towns, and even in the villages. Every American village, says M. Auzoux, endeavours to obtain a museum, an observatory, &c.

Page 157. The suppression of pain.--To prevent death is undoubtedly impossible; but we may prolong life. We may eventually render rarer, less cruel, and almost suppress pain.

That the hardened old world laughs at this expression is so much the better. We have seen this spectacle in the days when our Europe, barbarized by war, centred all medical art in surgery, and only knew how to cure by the knife by a horrible prodigality of suffering, young America discovered the miracle of that profound dream in which all pain is annihilated.

Page 157. The useful equilibrium of life and death.--Numerous species of birds no longer make a halt in France. One with difficulty descries them flying at inaccessible elevations, deploying their wings in haste, accelerating their passage, saying,--"Pass on, pass on quickly! Let us avoid the land of death, the land of destruction!"

Provence, and many other departments in the south, are barren deserts, peopled by every living tribe, and therefore vegetable nature is sadly impoverished. You do not interrupt with impunity the natural harmonies. The bird levies a tax on the plant, but he is its protector.

It is a matter of notoriety that the bustard has almost disappeared from Champagne and Provence. The heron has passed away; the stork is rare. As we gradually encroach upon the soil, these species, partial to dusty wastes and morasses, depart to seek a livelihood elsewhere. Our progress in one sense is our poverty. In England the same fact has been observed. (See the excellent articles on Sport and Natural History, translated from Messrs. St. John, Knox, Gosse, and others, in the Revue Britannique.) The heath-cock retires before the step of the cultivator; the quail passes into Ireland. The ranks of the herons grow daily thinner before the utilitarian improvements of the nineteenth century. But to these causes we must add the barbarism of man, which so heedlessly destroys a throng of innocent species. Nowhere, says M. Pavie, a French traveller, is game more timid than in our fields.

Woe to the ungrateful people! And by this phrase I mean the sporting crowd who, unmindful of the numerous benefits we owe to animals, have exterminated innocent life. A terrible sentence of the Creator weighs upon the tribes of sportsmen,--they can create nothing. They originate no art, no industry. They have added nothing to the hereditary patrimony of the human species. What has their heroism profited the Indians of North America? Having organized nothing, having accomplished nothing permanent, these races, despite their singular energy, have disappeared from the earth before inferior men, the last emigrants of Europe.

Do not believe the axiom that huntsmen gradually develop into agriculturists. It is not so--they kill or die; such is their whole destiny. We see it clearly through experience. He who has killed, will kill; he who has created, will create.

In the want of emotion which every man suffers from his birth, the child who satisfies it habitually by murder, by a miniature ferocious drama of surprise and treason, of the torture of the weak, will find no great enjoyment in the gentle and tranquil emotions arising from the progressive success of toil and study, from the limited industry which does everything itself. To create, to destroy--these are the two raptures of infancy: to create is a long, slow process; to destroy is quick and easy. The least act of creation implies those best gifts of the Creator and of kindly Nature: gentleness and patience.

It is a shocking and hideous thing to see a child partial to "sport;" to see woman enjoying and admiring murder, and encouraging her child. That delicate and sensitive woman would not give him a knife, but she gives him a gun: kill at a distance--be it so! for we do not see the suffering. And this mother will think it admirable that her son, kept confined to his room, shall drive off ennui by plucking the wings from flies, by torturing a bird or a little dog.

Far-seeing mother! She will know when too late the evil of having formed a hard heart. Aged and weak, rejected of the world, she will experience in her turn her son's brutality.

* * * * *

But rifle practice? They will object to you. Must not the child grow skilful in killing, that, from murder to murder, he may at last arrive at the surpassing feat of killing the flying swallow? The only country in Europe where everybody knows how to handle a musket is that where the bird is least exposed to slaughter. The land of William Tell knew how to place before her children a juster and more exalted object when they liberated their country.

* * * * *

France is not cruel. Why, then, this love of murder, this extermination of the animal world?

It is the impatient people, the young people, the childish people, in a rude and restless childhood. If they cannot be doing in creating, they will be doing by destroying.

But what they most fatally injure is--themselves! A violent education, stormily impassioned in love or severity, crushes in the child, withers, chokes up the first moral flower of natural sensitiveness, all that was purest of the maternal milk, the germ of universal love which rarely blooms again.

Among too many children we are saddened by their almost incredible sterility. A few recover from it in the long circle of life, when they have become experienced and enlightened men. But the first freshness of the heart? It shall return no more.

How is it that this nation, otherwise born under such felicitous circumstances, is, with rare and local exceptions, accursed with so singular an incapacity for harmony? It has its own peculiar songs, its charming little melodies of vivacity and mirth. But it needs a prolonged effort, a special education, to attain to harmony.

Page 158. Flattening of the brain.--The weight of the brain, compared with that of the body, is, in the

Ostrich, in the ratio of 1 to 1200 Goose, 1 to 360 Duck, 1 to 257 Eagle, 1 to 160 Plover, 1 to 122 Falcon, 1 to 102 Paroquet, 1 to 45 Robin, 1 to 32 Jay, 1 to 28 Chaffinch, cock, sparrow, goldfinch, 1 to 25 Hooded tomtit, 1 to 16 Blue-cap tomtit, 1 to 12

(Estimate of Haller and Leuret.)

Page 158. The noble falcon.--The noble birds (the falcon, gerfalcon, saker) are those which hold their prey by the talon, and kill it with the bill: their bill, for this purpose, is toothed. The ignoble birds (the eagle, the kite, &c.) are for the most part swift of flight (voiliers): these employ their talons to rend and choke their victims. The rameurs rise with difficulty, which enables the voiliers to escape them the more easily. The tactics of the former are to feign, in the first place, to rise to a great height; and then, by suffering themselves to drop, they disconcert the manoeuvres of the voiliers. (Huber, Vol des Oiseaux de Proie, 1784, 4to. He was the first of that clever lineage, Huber of the birds, Huber of the bees, Huber of the ants.)

Page 177. Its happiness in the morning, when terrors vanish!--"Before" (says Tschudi) "the vermeil tints of the early dew have announced the approach of the sun, oftentimes before even the lightest gleam has heralded dawn in the east, while the stars still sparkle in the sombre azure of heaven, a low murmur resounds on the summit of a venerable pine, and is speedily followed by a more or less distinct prattling; then the notes arise, and an interminable series of keen sounds strike the air on every side like a clang of swords continually hurtled one against another. It is the coupling time of the wood-cock. With his eye a-flame, he dances and springs on the branch, while below him, in the copse, his hens repose tranquilly, and reverently contemplate the mad antics of their lord and master. He is not long left alone to animate the forest. The mavis rises in his turn, shaking the dew from his glittering feathers. Behold him whetting his bill upon the branch, and leaping from bough to bough, up to the very crest of the maple tree where he has slept, astonished to find nearly all life still slumbering in the forest, though the dawn has taken the place of night. Twice, thrice, he hurls his fanfare at the echoes of the mountain and the valley, which a dense mist still envelopes.

"Thin columns of white smoke escape from the roof of the cottages; the dogs bark around the farm-yards; and the bells ring suspended to the neck of the cow. The birds now quit their thickets, flutter their wings, and dart into the air to salute the sun, which once more comes to bless them with his bounteous light. More than one poor little sparrow rejoices that he has escaped the perils of the darkness. Perched on a little twig, he had trusted to enjoy his slumber without alarm, his head buried beneath his wing, when, by the ray of a star, he discerned the noiseless screech-owl gliding through the trees, intent upon some misdeed. The pole-cat stole from the valley-depth, the ermine descended from the rock, the pine-marten quitted his nest, the fox prowled among the bushes. All these enemies the poor little one watched during this terrible night. On his tree, on the earth, in the air--destruction menaced him on every side. How long, how long were the hours when, not daring to move, his only protection was the young leaves which screened him! And now, how great the pleasure to ply his unfettered wing, to live in safety, protected, defended by the light!

"The chaffinch raises with all his energy his clear and sonorous note; the robin sings from the summit of the larch, the goldfinch amid the alder-groves, the blackbird and the bullfinch beneath the leafy arbours. The tomtit, the wren, and the troglodyte mingle their voices. The stockdove coos, and the woodpecker smites his tree. But far above these joyous utterances re-echo the melodious strains of the woodlark and the inimitable song of the thrush."

Page 185. Migrations.--For the famished Arab, the lank inhabitant of the desert, the arrival of the migrating birds, weary and heavy at this season, and, therefore, easy to catch, is a blessing from God, a celestial manna. The Bible tells us of the raptures of the Israelites, when, during their wanderings in Arabia Petræa, fasting and enfeebled, they suddenly saw descending upon them the winged food: not the locusts of abstemious Elias, not the bread with which the raven nourished his bowels, but the quail heavy with fat, delicious and yet substantial, which voluntarily fell into their hands. They ate to repletion; and no longer regretted the rich flesh-pots of Pharaoh.

I willingly excuse the gluttony of the famished. But what shall I say of our people, in the richest countries of Europe, who, after harvest and vintage-time, with barns and cellars brimming full, pursue with no less fury these poor travellers? Thin or fat, they are equally good: they would eat even the swallows; they devour the song-birds, "those which have only a voice." Their wild frenzy dooms the nightingale to the spit, plucks and kills the household guest, the poor robin, which yesterday fed from their hands.