BAY THEE BEAR. 



321 



filaments filiform ; anthers oval, two-celled ; styles 

 two, divovy-inir. 



HAY TREE. The Laurus nobilig (Willdenow). 

 Tliis celebrated tree is a native of Italy, and among 

 the Romans was the emblem of victory. It is scarcely 

 hardy enough to bear severe winters, unless the situa- 

 tion be high and dry. It is beautifully evergreen, 

 and grows like a great bush rather than a tree, and 

 emits a very pleasant resinous scent like that of 

 myrtles. The leaves are used by cooks and confec- 

 tioners for flavouring dishes, &c. 



BEAR ( Ursus). A genus of Plantigrade mamma- 

 lia, or those which apply the whole sole of the foot 

 to the ground in walking ; and by much the largest 

 and most formidable of those which have this habit. 

 The genus cannot be considered as strictly and ex- 

 clusively carnivorous, but rather as one which is vcrr 

 miscellaneous in its feeding ; and yet when goaded 

 on bv hunger, or roused by any thing irritating, there 

 are few animals which show greater ferocity, or rend 

 in pieces that wliich they overcome with more savage 

 display. Animals whose general habit is predatory 

 always kill their prey in what may be called a "busi- 

 ness-like manner." They attack some vital part, so 

 that, their attack speedily becomes fatal ; and those 

 which are of inferior mechanical strength, very gene- 

 rally bleed their prey to death by a small incised 

 wound ; nor is there one among the habitual preyers 

 on living animals which begins to eat till the prey has 

 ceased to live. But when the bear " plays the butcher," 

 he does it like one whom nature has not bred to the 

 trade. He tears away at the part upon which he first 

 seizes, and when he tears from hunger, the moment 

 that he begins to tear he begins to eat. His feast upon 

 a warm-blooded animal is thus the most sanguinary 

 and savage to be met with in nature. But it is so far 

 from being habitual to him, that he probably never 

 has recourse to it if he can find food of any other 

 kind. Wild berries and other fruits, in search of the 

 last of which he can climb with great dexterity, ho- 

 ney, which he also generally finds in the trees, the 

 eggs and young of birds, small mammalia, and, when 

 it comes in his way, carrion, however putrid, are the 

 ordinary food of the bear. 



This must not, however, be considered as extending 

 literally to the white, or polar bear ; for that species, 

 by inhabiting the margins of the polar ice, has to 

 depend chiefly on the sea for food, and in that case 

 he must feed upon animal matters indiscriminately 

 on what the sea casts up, and on those who come to 

 feed upon it, but chiefly upon the former. 



Bears of some species or other are found in every 

 latitude, and therefore their habits must vary with the 

 climates and seasons of these ; but there is a very 

 considerable uniformity of structure in the whole 

 race ; and the typical ones, or those which possess the 

 character in the highest degree of perfection, are cer- 

 tainly the inhabitants of cold climates. The natives 

 of the sunny lands though there they are in the 

 cave and the forest, rather than the sunshine are 

 feeble in body and subdued in temper, compared 

 with the dwellers on the margin of the polar snow. Not 

 ;i eold climate merely, but one in* which nature has along 

 winter of repose, seems to be best suited for developing 

 the character of the bear, or rather, it is the extremes 

 of seasons which suit them, and not any particular 

 degree of average temperature, for they live under the 

 <-!|M:i.(or as well as in the polar circle. 



Bears may be considered as animals of the northern 

 NAT. HIST. VOL. I. 



hemisphere, in both continents of which they are 

 found ; but they do not appear to extend to the south 

 of the equator, except, perhaps, on the Andes, where 

 there is the temperature of every climate over a vast 

 range of latitude ; and there are none in New Hol- 

 land, or even in Africa. It is not improbable that 

 those which are found in the forests of the tropical 

 countries may have originally migrated from the 

 north, and been gradually changed by climate ; and 

 it is certain that, in Europe, they were much more 

 abundant in former times than they are now. The 

 diminution has taken place not merely on account of 

 the breadth of surface from which they have been 

 driven by thicker peopling and cultivation, nnd the 

 destruction of them by hunting for in western 

 Europe they have become few in those wild forests 

 which culture has never invaded ; and where men 

 begin to till the ground, and follow the other occu- 

 pations of civilised life, they hunt much less than 

 when, in far fewer numbers, they are wholly depen- 

 dent on the wild productions of nature. 



The improvement of climate, or, at all events, 

 the approximate equalising of the seasons, of which 

 the diminished number of bears is one of the evi- 

 dences, does not appear to be wholly the result of 

 culture. Much of Europe to the southward of the 

 Baltic, and about the Black Sea, and also not a 

 little of Asia to the northward and eastward of the 

 Caspian Sea, has certainly, at "some period of the 

 world's history, been under water. Of this fact, science 

 furnishes us with abundant evidence confiimator)' of 

 Holy Writ. At that period, also, there must have 

 been much of it under forest ; and from these circum- 

 stances we may conclude, that then the climate much 

 more resembled that of the northern parts of America 

 than it does now. The few facts which we are able 

 to glean from history prove this, although all which we 

 can regard as authentic refer to times much more 

 recent than when this must have been the case. But 

 the inhabitants of ancient Rome were certainly as 

 familiar with snow as the inhabitants of modern 

 London ; and the Tiber was as often frozen over then 

 as the Thames, even above the tideway, is now. 



At these times it is hiti'lily probable that the bears 

 of Europe ranged seasonally from the Bailie or 

 from Scandinavia to the Mediterranean, just as 

 those of America still range from the northern parts 

 .of the Stony Mountains to the shores of the Gulf of 

 Mexico. 



With us, therefore, the history of bears is a history 

 of those whose day has gone by ; and though we 

 have no record of the more ancient races in history, 

 we have indubitable monuments in the bones of the 

 animals themselves, which are found in no inconsider- 

 able numbers in plains much farther to the south than 

 any which the bear now inhabits in Europe. The 

 bones of the great extinct species (Urtm spclams}, 

 the size of which must have been equal in lineal 

 dimensions to that of the horse, and, from the diti'er- 

 ent form of the animals, vastly more in solid contents 

 and in strength, are found, though sparingly, in some 

 of the caves in England ; and although, unlike as the 

 animals are to each other, there is some popular con- 

 fusion in the names of the bear and the boar, yet there 

 is little doubt that, even later than the time of the 

 Romans, the common brown bear was to met with in 

 both the southern and the northern division of Britain. 



At present the line of its habitation is much farther 

 to the northward in western Europe, though in the 

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