ANIMALS AS FELLOW-CREATURES. .339 



kind, much of which may still be gleaned in out-of- 

 the-way places.^ 



Fable, howeyer, embodies only a very embryonic 

 stage of poetic sympathy. We have still to look for the 

 naturalist who will let us into the secrets of animal 

 lives, tell us what they really are, and help us to 

 translate their ideas and feelings in termfe of our own. 

 ■" We should go to the ornithologist with a new feel- 

 ing,'^ says Emerson, " if he could teach us what the 

 social birds say, when they sit in the autumn council, 

 talking together in the trees. The want of sympathy 

 makes his record a dull dictionary. His result is a 

 ■dead bird. The bird is not in its ounces and inches, 

 but in its relations to nature ; and the skin or skeleton 

 you show me, is no more a heron, than a heap of 

 ashes or a bottle of gases into which his body has 

 been reduced, is Dante or Washington." 



We have made some progress, certainly, since the 

 •day when Zoology was a study of ounces and inches ; 

 it is now a study of homologies and phylogenetic 

 histories. But we must not therefore think we have 

 attained everything that is to be desired. That 

 accurate description of details of outward form which 



' As a specimen of the humorous in fables of animal life, 

 nothing better can be named than Ralston's translation from 

 the Russian of Krilof's fables (Oassell : 1883, 3s. U). The 

 .student in search of information regarding the place taken by 

 various animals in mythology and fable should consult the 

 English translation of Animal Mythology, by Prof. A. de 

 •Gubernatis (Trilbner, 1872). 



