CHAPTER VI. 



SACRED BABOONS. 



SOME fifty years ago, the English naturalist Waterton 

 conceived the idea of turning his paternal estate into an 

 asylum for persecuted birds and beasts. He surrounded 

 the entire domain with a stone wall eight feet high, and 

 never allowed a shot to be fired on his grounds, in order 

 to try "how tame kind treatment would make the shyest 

 children of our All-Father." The wall, however, does 

 not seem to have been high enough for the mischievous 

 boys of the neighborhood ; and Charles Waterton's pets 

 never got rid of that hereditary dread of the bimanous 

 species to which their ancestors had owed their safety 

 for perhaps a thousand generations. 



But the ideal which the British experimenter failed 

 to attain has been fully realized in the birth-land of the 

 human race, in Nepaul and Hindostan, and especially 

 in the Ganges Valley, where the preservation of primi- 

 tive habits and the doctrine of metempsychosis have 

 made man the brother and playmate of his dumb fel- 

 low-creatures. Nearly all the South-Asiatic vegetarians 



treat mischievous animals with a more than Christian 

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