THE CROWS. Iig 



again. Zoologically considered, the Crow is merely 

 a bird of the corvine family, which is found abun- 

 dantly throughout the peninsula of India, and is, as 

 the phrase goes, " too well known to require descrip- 

 tion." But then its chief point is that you cannot 

 consider it zoologically, except, indeed, as you may 

 consider man zoologically, There are said to be men 

 of science in Germany who have succeeded in purging 

 their minds completely from all taint of sentiment and 

 unreason, and can think of man with scientific pre- 

 cision as one of the many species of the mamalian order 

 Quadrumana. But to most of us this is impossible. 

 We think habitually of man and animal as contrasted, 

 and the Crow takes its place in our minds with man, 

 not, indeed, as a kind of man, but as an appendage to 

 him, one of the conditions of his life, an element of 

 his social system. This is the peculiarity of the 

 Crow. It has separated itself from the category of 

 birds which live in the fields and woods and belong 

 to nature. It lives in towns and belongs to man in 

 the sense in which we contrast man and nature. Like 

 the Mahar outside an Indian village, whose perquisite 

 is the hides of all the cattle that die in the village, the 

 Crow lives outside the bungalow and claims the 

 refuse of all food eaten within it. But if you do not 

 provide a reasonable amount of refuse, the Crows 

 will come inside and help themselves, as the Mahars 

 will poison cattle if enough do not die of themselves ; 

 for there is no right to which the Crows cling more 

 tenaciously than the right to be fed by the man whose 

 compound they clean. Sometimes Crows feed on 

 fruits, or hunt for worms in ploughed fields, or gather 

 to catch the winged white-ants which issue from the 



