3o8 Wild Beasts 



Wolves are very powerful animals in proportion to their 

 size ; active, hardy, with strong and formidably armed 

 jaws. Their senses are all extremely well developed, 

 their speed is great, and the tireless gallop of the wolf 

 has given rise to stereotyped phrases and comparisons 

 in many languages. 



Leaving now the zoological relations of wolves, their 

 habits, character, and capacity present themselves for 

 consideration. At the commencement of such an inquiry 

 we find sources of information upon some of these points 

 which are valuable in themselves, and in their general 

 tenor conclusive. 



Cuvier (" Regne Animal") asserts that the wolf is "the 

 most mischievous of all the carnivora of Europe," and it 

 would have been possible to know this from the folk-lore 

 of those countries alone. In mythology and minstrelsy, 

 in fireside story and local legend, wolves stand foremost 

 among wild beasts in nations of the Celtic and Teutonic 

 stocks. Their fierce visages look out from all the darker 

 superstitions of the Old World, and echoes of their 

 unearthy cry linger in the saddest of its surviving ex- 

 pressions of dread, foreboding, and despair. Hans Sachs 

 called them "the hunting dogs of the Lord"; but this 

 is a conception restricted to a single religion, and nearly 

 everywhere from Greece to Norway, the wolf has been 

 an object of horror and hate, an incarnation of evil, the 

 emblem, agent, or associate of those unseen beings under 

 whose forms terror personified unknown and destructive 

 forces. 



All this is not meaningless ; great masses of men do 



