ANIMAL ANTIPATHIES 167 



normal size and proportions pass every day before 

 its cage. 



The belief in permanent antipathies among animals 

 is very ancient. It appears in all the monkish bestiaries. 

 There the otter is always the enemy of the crocodile, 

 and the unicorn of the elephant;* while the dragon 

 is hated by the hart, and in turn dislikes all beasts, 

 including the panther, whose exquisite perfume, so 

 agreeable to all other animals, disgusts the dragon, who 

 runs away the moment he smells it. Turning from 

 legend to facts, we find that animal antipathies have a 

 range as wide or wider than the instinctive dislikes of 

 men. They are in part exactly the same in kind as the 

 latter, one animal exciting in another exactly the same 

 disgust that a baboon or a blackbeetle does in the 

 minds of many human beings ; but the list of hereditary 

 enemies of one species which is the sworn foe of 

 another, and has left in the weaker species an inbred 

 and ancient sense of horror and fear is far longer than 

 the list of hereditary enemies of the dominant species, 

 man. Instances of purely instinctive, inexplicable 

 antipathy are naturally the least common, but there 

 are very marked and definite examples. It is quite 

 impossible, for instance, to account for the intense 

 disgust which the camel excites in horses. They have 



* Possibly this tradition is founded on the enmity which does 

 really exist between the rhinosceros and the elephant. 



