172 ANIMAL ANTIPATHIES 



spending their spare moments in polishing either these 

 or their teeth. They did not smoke, they did not 

 drink, and the large room in which some thirty of 

 them slept was as sweet as a hayloft. When all this 

 gallant company of dark men entered the lion-house, 

 there was an uproar. The animals were furious ; they 

 roared with rage. The apes and monkeys were 

 frightened and angry, the antelopes were alarmed, and 

 even the phlegmatic wild cattle were excited. They 

 recognised their natural enemies, the dark-skinned men 

 who have hunted them for a thousand centuries in the 

 jungles and the bush, and with whom their own parents 

 did battle when they were captured and carried off 

 captive in the Nubian deserts, and, like the Grecian 

 ghosts at the sight of ^Eneas in the shades, they raised 

 a war-cry, though the sound did not die in their throats. 

 Animal antipathy is thus closely correlated with like 

 emotions in man. It may be traced in all its variations 

 from purely instinctive and physical distaste, the dislike 

 for the camel felt by the horse being much on a par 

 with that felt by a Southern white for a South American 

 negro, to its rational climax in antipathy based on 

 danger known to animals and men alike, and exhibited 

 in the common and intense horror of the poisonous 

 snake. A tame monkey has been known to drop 

 down in a dead faint when suddenly confronted with 

 a snake. This sounds almost too human ; but fainting 



