380 SUMMER. 



luntary dazzle which enables one to catch owls at 

 night, by a bright torch or lantern ; and it is 

 the very same that makes fire in a savage country 

 the best defence against all the wild beasts that prey 

 during the night. These animals have, and can 

 have, no speculative alarm at fire ; but they feel 

 its physical action an animal inconvenience in the 

 blinding that it occasions, and therefore they avoid 

 it. That the seasons at which night animals come 

 abroad, depends merely on the action of circum- 

 stances upon their physical structure, is proved by 

 the fact that owls, goatsuckers, and all the nocturnal 

 train, come abroad when the day is unusually dark, 

 either from clouds or from an extensive eclipse of 

 the sun ; and the fact of their doing so, though it 

 depends on nothing but the apparent twilight state 

 of the air, was, in the case of the eclipses, one of 

 the great means whereby the superstitiously porten- 

 tous nature of these phenomena was conferred, and 

 also why those gloomy days that bring the owl 

 from its hiding place, are accounted days of fate, 

 by those who are not acquainted with the physical 

 causes : and, as long as the conduct of animals are 

 attributed to a prescience of what is to come, 

 whether that be called an instinct of their own or an 

 impression of any thing mysterious that has no 

 cause in the circumstances that precede their con- 

 duct, so long will the delightful subject of natural 

 history be prostituted to the rivetting of those chains 

 of mental and moral delusion which the proper study 

 of it is so well calculated to destroy. 



