SHRIKES AND DAWS. 103 
he will content himself with a rabbit, a bird or two, 
or even, in default of larger game, with a repast of 
insects or worms ; and there is no doubt that of these 
latter he destroys a large number in the course of the 
year. 
Still, however, his principal duties lie in removing 
from the earth the garbage which, by its putrefaction, 
would become the source of disease. Like that of 
the vulture, the hyzena, and the burying-beetle, his 
mission is to transmute death into life, to purify the 
atmosphere without which that life cannot be main- 
tained, and to benefit others higher than himself 
while yet providing only for his own individual re- 
quirements. 
He knows not the work that he ree nor yet that 
he works at all. But his labours are none the less 
real and appreciable, serving by one effort a double 
purpose, and rendering him that performs them a 
worker in that vast scheme which numbers among its 
servants all living beings, and which is bounded in its 
wide comprehensiveness only by the limits of time 
itself. 
To the efforts of such as he we owe the very pos- 
sibility of our existence in the world. In ages long 
since past, when marsh and swamp and unwholesome 
morass overspread the surface of the globe, the rep- 
tile race reigned supreme, for none of a higher 
organisation could breathe the fcetid air, or with- 
stand the deadly influence of the miasmatic vapour 
which hung like a pall over the reeking earth. Year 
after year, and century after century, they laboured 
