234 FROM NORTH POLE TO EQUATOR. 



Thus was the " Hosanna in the Highest" sung in our ears by the 

 primeval forest. 



THE MIGRATIONS OF MAMMALS. 



The love of travel, as we understand it, is not found among ani- 

 mals, not even among the birds, whose sublime powers of flight over 

 land and sea so much excite our envy. For no animals \vander, 

 careless and free, like the travellers who go forth to study the 

 manners and customs of other lands ; they cling to the soil even 

 more closely than we do, and they are bound to the place of their 

 birth, by habit or indolence, more closely than we are by our love of 

 home. When it does happen that they forsake their birthplace, it 

 is in obedience to stern necessity, to escape impending starvation. 

 But want and misery are too often their lot in the joyless lands to 

 which they migrate, and so they experience little but the pain and 

 toil of travel. 



This holds true of wandering fishes and of migrating birds, 

 but more particularly of those mammals which undertake periodic 

 migrations. Few of them do this with the same regularity, but all 

 do it for the same reasons, as fishes and birds. They migrate to 

 escape from scarcity of food, already felt or at least threatening, and 

 their journeying is therefore rather a flight from destruction than a 

 striving to reach happier fields. 



By the migrations of mammals I mean neither the excursions 

 which result in an extension of their range of distribution, nor the 

 ordinary expeditions in search of food, but those journeys which 

 lead certain mammals, at regular or irregular intervals, far beyond 

 the boundaries of their home, into countries where they are com- 

 pelled to adopt a mode of life which is foreign to them, and which 

 they will abandon as soon as it is possible, or seems possible to do 

 so. Such journeys correspond closely to the regular migrations of 

 fishes and birds, and a knowledge of the former helps us to an 

 understanding of the latter. 



Excursions beyond their actual place of sojourn are made by all 



