PBODUCED BY MAN. 841 



Saturnalia ; and in a very short time the entire race of sheep, ex- 

 cept in a few mountain districts, would have been as wastefully 

 slaughtered for their blood and fat as flocks and herds have been 

 and still are slaughtered by us in Australia or South America. Oxen 

 would hold out a little longer than sheep, and pigs, I incline to 

 think, longer than either. But that a great diminution of the sum 

 total of brute enjoyment, and, if such a thing there be, of brute 

 happiness also, would take place after we had disappeared, I think 

 needs no demonstration, especially to anybody who, without any 

 experience of any canine mutiny, has ever studied the phenomena 

 of a dog-show or listened at night to the opera which its denizens 

 perform. The various races which, without exactly being do- 

 mesticated, stand yet on the borderland separating wild from 

 domesticated life, would also very shortly and very sharply have 

 brought home to them the fact of their being more dependent on 

 man than perhaps either they or we have entirely recognised. 

 Rabbits and hares, pheasants and partridges, if they had reason, 

 would reasonably regret the times when they viewed, with some- 

 thing perhaps of disgust, the slouching form of the gamekeeper 

 with his double-barrelled shot-gun perambulating the ridings in the 

 woods and skirting their sunny boundaries. Cats and weasels 

 would with little less delay than the dogs make the life of quad- 

 rupeds just specified as miserable as that of the sheep and ox had 

 already been made ; and would, after the lapse of a year or two, 

 with the aid of hawks and corvidae of several kinds, greatly thin 

 their numbers. The river embankments on the lower Thames, 

 lastly, which excited the admiration of Sir Christopher Wren, and 

 were referred by him to the time of the Romans, and also those 

 on many other rivers, having no one to repair any of the breaches 

 which floods would make in them, would before very long allow a 

 very large acreage of land to become swamp, marsh, and lagune ; 

 not only thus, on the one hand, depriving many species of animals 

 of their means of subsistence, but also on the other introducing pre- 

 datory birds, such as gulls, and accelerating the disappearance of 

 many others which really hold their own in such neighbourhoods 

 even now only by man's protection and thanks to his presence. 



The purview of this prophecy extends no further than the pre- 

 cincts of the British Islands; in continental countries organic 

 nature would more completely resort to the condition it was in 



