OF WILD ANIMALS 267 



from predatory animals. The wonderful giant penguins found 

 and photographed near the south pole by Sir Ernest Shackleton 

 never had seen nor heard of men, never had been attacked by 

 predatory animals or birds. You may search this wide world 

 over, and you will not find a more striking example of sublime 

 isolation. Those penguins had been living in a penguin's 

 paradise. The sea-leopard seals harmed them not, and until 

 the arrival of the irrepressible British explorer the spell of 

 that antarctic elysium was unbroken. 



Those astounding birds knew no such emotion as fear. 

 Under the impulse of the icy waves dashing straight up to the 

 edge of the ice floes, those giant penguins shot out of the water, 

 sped like catapulted birds curving through the air, and landed 

 on their cushioned breasts high and dry, fully ten feet back from 

 the edge of the floe. They flocked together, they waddled about 

 erect and serene, heads high in air, and marched close up to the 

 ice-bound ship to see what it was all about. Men and horses 

 freely walked among them without exciting fear, and when the 

 birds gathered in a vast assemblage the naturalists and pho- 

 tographers were welcomed everywhere. 



And indeed those birds were well-nigh the most fortunate 

 birds in all the world. The men who found them were not low- 

 browed butchers thinking only of "oil" or "fertilizer"; and they 

 did not go to work at once to club all those helpless birds into 

 masses of death and corruption. Those men wondered at 

 them, laughed at them, photographed them, studied them, — 

 and left them in peace,! 



What a thundering contrast that was with the usual course 

 of Man, the bloody savage, under such circumstances! The 

 coast of Lower California once swarmed with seals, sea-lions 

 and birds, and the waters of the Gulf were alive with whales. 

 Now the Gulf and the shores of the Peninsula are as barren of 

 wild life as Death Valley. 



The history of the whaling industry contains many sick- 

 ening records of the wholesale slaughter by savage whalers 



