2 NATURAL HISTORY. 



their presence, or wholly inobservant of their characters, 

 habits, and modes of life. The contrary must always 

 have been the case. It may well be that the rude Palaeo- 

 lithic men who roamed through the trackless forests of 

 Western Europe, clad in undressed skins, and armed only 

 with roughly chipped flints, would gaze wholly unmoved 

 on the thousand beauties of the world around them. 

 Nature has no emotional side, save for those whose souls 

 are freed from the ever-present necessity of procuring food 

 and raiment, shelter from the elements, and protection 

 against wild beasts. 



Precisely the same indifference to the softer aspects 

 of nature, and the same insensibility to its beauties, are 

 shown by modern savages, and, for essentially the same 

 reasons, by the poorest members of civilised com- 

 munities at the present day. We may take it for 

 granted, however, that, just as existing savages are 

 usually accurately acquainted with the larger animals 

 inhabiting their country, so the early flint-men of Post- 

 glacial Europe must have possessed a minute knowledge 

 of the external characters and habits of such animals as 

 the cave-lion, the cave-bear, the mammoth, and the rein- 

 deer. Such accurate knowledge of animals, however, even 

 if wholly confined to an acquaintance with their general 

 appearance and mode of life, is, in truth, the basis of 

 scientific natural history. 



It is probable, then, that the beginnings of natural 

 history consisted in the knowledge, which the early races 

 of mankind could not fail to acquire, of all those larger 

 animals which, inhabiting the earth or its waters, were 

 either of value for food, or a source of danger from their 



