66 HOW THE AUTHOR WAS LED TO 
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which we wage against nature. We destroy the very birds 
that protect our crops—our guardians, our honest labourers 
Ba —which, following close upon the plough, seize the future 
\ pest, which the heedless peasant disturbs only to replace in 
the earth. 
Whole races, valuable and interesting, perish. Those lords of ocean, 
those wild and sagacious creatures which Nature has endowed with 
blood and milk—I speak of the cetacea—to what number are they 
reduced! Many great quadrupeds have vanished from the globe. 
Many animals of every kind, without utterly disappearing, have 
recoiled before man ; brutalized (ensawvagés) they fly, they lose their 
natural arts, and relapse into barbarism. The heron, whose prudence 
and address were remarked by Aristotle, is now, at least in 
Europe, a misanthropical, narrow-minded, half-foolish animal. The 
beaver, which, in America, in its peaceful solitudes, had become 
a great architect and engineer, has grown discouraged ;* to-day 
it has scarcely the heart to excavate a burrow in the earth. The 
hare, so gentle, so handsome, distinguished by its fur, its swiftness, 
its wonderful delicacy of ear, will soon have disappeared; the few 
of its kind which remain are positively embruted. And yet the 
* Compare the interesting descriptions of the huge dams erected by beavers across the 
American rivers, in Milton and Cheadle’s valuable narrative of travel, “The North-West 
Passage by Land.”—Transtator. 
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