ANIMAL PUGNACITY. 163 



felonious building, but we have witnessed the demoli- 

 tion of a nest by rooks, which were obviously in a state 

 of strong excitement, and we have seen one taking no 

 share in the business, crawling upon a twig, and cawing 

 most dolorously as if it had been suffering wrong ; but 

 there is such a" family likeness among rooks that we 

 could never say positively that that was the bona fide 

 owner of the spoiled nest. 



If we were to take any analogy from other animals, 

 and between animal and animal the analogy of animals 

 is certainly better than the analogy of man, we should 

 feel inclined to think that their retributive justice would 

 with us get the very opposite name. When animals, 

 in a state of nature and without any training from 

 man, fight with their own species at all, the fight, unless 

 it be for their females or their young, in which animals 

 that are otherwise timid become valiant, is always the 

 fight for conquest and not for justice, and, when a third 

 strikes in, it almost universally falls upon the van- 

 quished or the weaker. Dogs that come to a dog-fight 

 always begin to worry the dog that is down; stags chace 

 the beaten stag, and drive him from the herd; and we 

 remember no case in which the conqueror, however 

 much he may have been the aggressor, thereby roused 

 the indignation of any of the rest. There seems in all 

 those cases a propensity to triumph, and if the triumph 

 has been in part won by one, it is eagerly caught at by 

 others. We have met with nothing in the conduct of 

 rooks by which we could infer a deviation from this 

 apparently general law of animals; and, therefore, it 

 may be that the rook which suffers, does so, just because 

 it is not so strong or so skilful a warrior as the rest. 



