368 Wild Beasts 



was but little visited, and when the public demanded an 

 exciting story about a much dreaded animal that was fitted 

 to play in the New World the same part that the famous 

 beasts of prey did in the Old." This, with much more to 

 the same effect ; and then, after a passing notice that Pech- 

 uel and Loesche found no grizzlies that would stand, he 

 quotes General Marcy at length to show that they are 

 rather harmless, cowardly, contemptible creatures, and dis- 

 misses the beast in disgrace. 



Marcy relates (" Thirty Years of Army Life on the Bor- 

 der ") that when he reached the haunts of grizzly bears, 

 he expected to see destructive monsters in a perpetual 

 rage, like Buffon's tigers. It was his belief that they would 

 attack mounted men with rifles as soon as they came in 

 sight, that these bears desired nothing more than to fight, 

 in season and out of it, irrespective of time, place, or cir- 

 cumstances, and without reference to odds or any former 

 experiences of the results. Not finding any such extraor- 

 dinarily besotted idiots as this, the soldier, who seems to 

 have been as fit to decide upon questions of comparative 

 psychology as he was to give opinions in canon-law, became 

 possessed with conceptions that are counterparts of those 

 announced by Brehm. Those extracts made from the lat- 

 ter were taken from a very voluminous and undoubtedly 

 valuable work on natural history, but its author has said 

 nothing concerning the anomaly of a beast of prey twice 

 as large as a lion and fully as well armed, being naturally 

 timid and inoffensive, nor offered any suggestions with 

 respect to those conditions which changed what must 

 necessarily have been the brute's inherited character, be- 



