ON THE DISTRIBUTION OF MAMMALIA IN EUROPE. 231 
dencies, and his abundant resources, his situation has already 
begun to assume a precarious aspect.* 
There is an element of sadness in the fact that the 
beings to whom the sovereignty of the desert was entrusted 
are quickly passing away. Nothing but the legislature of 
the most important civilized states can prevent some of the 
noblest works of nature from disappearing from our sight 
for ever. A little assistance has already been received 
from this source, but to Africa and Australia, if not to 
Europe, it has come too late. 
It is the manifest duty of such a Society as this to 
endeavour, by every possible means, to preserve the exist- 
ence of those forms of life whose sad history we have traced, 
and to keep in mind the fact that they are the monuments 
of the infinite Power, Wisdom, and Love from which they 
sprang. “No direct effort of man,” says Jules Michelet, 
“has done so much for the welfare of the world as has been 
accomplished by those humble auxiliaries of human toil.” 
The same eloquent writer considers that the amelioration 
of their condition implies a moral gravity, a refinement, a 
delicacy of appreciation which are as yet scarcely under- 
stood, and which shall exist, perhaps, only when woman 
undertakes those scientific studies from which she has 
hitherto been excluded. 
The obstacle to which he has alluded is being rapidly 
removed, and nowhere so successfully as in Great Britain. 
Let us hope that the admission of woman to our universities 
and learned societies will give wider scope for the exercise 
of that tenderness which is the noblest characteristic of her 
nature, and which constitutes her sole claim to sexual 
superiority. It is a quality which Goethe, in the greatest 
of his prose works, Wilhelm Meister, has dignified with all 
the enthusiasm of his splendid genius, and which our greatest 
poetess has distinguished in softer strains— 
“Peruse the sacred volume—Him who died 
Her kiss betrayed not, nor her tongue denied, 
While even the apostle left him to his doom, 
She lingered round his cross, and watched his tomb.” 
* The Wild Boar, according to Lenz (Siiugetiere), attains the age of thirty 
years, 
