80 On Animals depicted on Antique Monuvients. 



time, if the investigation is not undertaken by some naturalist 

 more favourably situated tlian we are. In truth, all that we 

 have said on the subject of lost races ought only to be consider- 

 ed as a sketch of a work which will doubtless be finished by 

 those who, having the use of grand museums, will thus have 

 under their eyes the originals of those objects of which we have 

 only seen more or less faithful copies. 



The facts to which we have just been alluding certainly en- 

 able us to judge how many causes there are which unite in pro- 

 ducing the loss and annihilation of a great number of the wild 

 animals. We see that, besides natural causes ; politics, religion, 

 and even honour, engaging the grandees of Rome to vie with 

 one another in the amusements of the Circus, also co-operated 

 to the same effect. Though less active and less powerful than 

 natural causes, these others have certainly exercised a very con- 

 siderable influence upon the disappearance of certain animals ; 

 and the more so because that sacrifices, and the games of the 

 Circus, and triumphant feasts, led to the slaughter of vast mul- 

 titudes. To these causes are to be added those which, at a 

 later period, have resulted from the benefits brought about by 

 civilization, which by culture have cleared away forests, and 

 moors, and fens, and which consequently have destroyed the 

 tribes that dwelt there, where they, at the same time, found an 

 asvlum and shelter. Thus the destruction of numerous species 

 of wild animals may very well have been produced by very sim- 

 ple causes, altogether in the natural course of events ; and to 

 explain these great changes, it is not at all necessary to have 

 recourse to inundations or to violent and terrible revolutions. 



Nor, finally, let it be forgotten, that the living races must 

 have had a great tendency to decrease and disappear whenever 

 their mortality was greater than their reproduction. This cir- 

 cumstance must certainly have occurred whenever the indivi- 

 duals of the same race, whether through the influence of man, 

 or by any other cause, were so widely separated from each 

 other, that they could not congregate together so as to breed. 

 This cause, joined to those we have formerly enumerated, has 

 very probably produced the loss of many different races, of 

 which now-a-days we find traces only in the bowels of the earth, 

 or in the writings of the ancients, or finally in those antiques 

 which we owe to artists of a former day. 



