BIRDS OF PREY. 157 



mous prices which the falcon fetches, seems to prove that the 

 former, the noblest of the raptores, has now-a-days nearly disappeared. 



Thus nature gi'avitates towards a less violent order. Does this 

 mean that death will ever diminish? Death! no; but pain surely. 



The world little by little falls under the power of the Being who 

 alone understands the useful equilibrium of life and death, who can 

 regulate it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the 

 living species, to encourage them according to their merit or innocence 

 — to simplify, to soften, and (if I may hazard the word) to moralize 

 death, by rending it swift, and freeing it from ang-uish. 



Death was never our serious objection. Is it more than a simple 

 mask of life's transformations ? But pain is an objection, gi-ave, 

 cruel, terrible. Therefore, little by little, it will disappear from the 

 earth. Its agents, the fierce executioners of the life which they 

 plucked out by torture, are already very rare. 



Assuredly, when I survey, in the Museum, the sinister assemblage 

 of nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, I do not much regret the 

 destruction of these species. Whatever pleasure our personal in- 

 stincts of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take 

 in these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathlike 

 masks the baseness of their nature. Their pitifully flattened skulls 

 are sufficient evidence that, though greatly favoured with wing, and 

 crooked beak, and talons, they have not the least need to make use 

 of their intelligence. Their constitution, which has made them 

 swiftest of the swift, strongest of the strong, has enabled them to dis- 

 pense with address, stratagem, and tactic. As for the courage with 

 which one is tempted to endow them, what occasion have they to 

 display it, since they encounter none but inferior enemies? Enemies? 

 no ; victims ! When the rigour of the season, or hunger, drives their 

 young to emigrate, it leads to the beak of these dull tyrants count- 

 less numbers of innocents, very superior in every sense to their 

 murderers; it prodigalizes the birds which are artists, and singers, 

 and architects, as a prey to these vulgar assassins; and for the eagle 

 and the buzzard provides a banquet of nightingales. 



