ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 329 



Many depart, few return ; at each stage of their route they must 

 pay a tribute' of blood. The eagle waits on his crag, man watches in 

 the valley. He who escapes the tyrant of the air, falls a victim to 

 the tyrant of the earth. "A fortunate opportunity !" exclaims the 

 child or the sportsman, the ferocious child with whom murder is a 

 jest. "God has willed it so !" mutters the pious glutton; "let us be 

 resigned !" These are the judgments of man upon the carnival of 

 massacre. As yet we know nothing more, for history has not written 

 the opinions of the massacred. 



Migrations are exchanges for every country (except the poles, at 

 the epoch of winter). The particular condition of climate or food, 

 which decides the departure of one species of birds, is precisely that 

 which determines the arrival of another species. When the swallow 

 quits us at the autumn rains, we note the arrival of the army of 

 plovers and peewits in quest of the lobworms driven from their lurking- 

 places by the floods. In October, and as the cold increases, the green- 

 finches, the yellow-hammers, the wrens, replace the song-birds which 

 have deserted us. The snipes and partridges descend from their moun- 

 tains at the moment when the quail and the thrush emigrate towards 

 the south. It is then, too, that the legions of the aquatic species quit 

 the extreme north for those temperate climes where the seas, the 

 lakes, and the pools, do not freeze. The wild geese, the swans, the 

 divers, the ducks, the teal, cleave the. air in battle array, and swoop 

 down upon the lakes of Scotland and Hungary, and our marshes of 

 the south. The delicate stork flies southward, when his cousin, the 



crane, sets out from the north, where his supplies begin to fail him. 

 Passing over our lands, he pays us tribute by delivering us from the 



