72 THE POLE. 
standing the magnificent economy of the globe, the majestic balance 
of those alternative currents which are the life of Ocean. They have 
seen war and hate, and the malice of nature, in those regular and 
profoundly pacific movements of the universal Mother. 
Such are the dreams of man. Animals, however, do not share 
in these antipathies, these terrors; a twofold attraction, on the 
contrary, impels them yearly towards the Poles in innumerable 
legions. 
Every year birds, fishes, gigantic cetaceans, hasten to people the 
seas and islands which surround the southern Pole. Wonderful seas, 
fertile, full to overflowing of rudimentary life (in the stage of the 
zoophytes), of living fermentation, of viscous waters, of spawn, of 
superabundant embryos. 
Both the Poles are for these innocent myriads, everywhere pur- 
sued by foes, the great, the happy rendezvous of love and peace. The 
whale, that unfortunate fish, which has, however, like ourselves, sweet 
milk and hot blood, that poor proscribed unfortunate which will soon 
have disappeared—it is there that it again finds a refuge, a halt for 
the sacred moments of maternity. No races are of purer or gentler 
disposition, none more fraternal towards their kin, more tender towards 
their offspring. Cruel ignorance of man! How can he have slain 
without horror the walrus and the seal, which in so many points 
are like himself? 
The giant man of the old ocean, the whale—a being as gentle 
as nan the dwarf is brutal—enjoys this advantage over him: sure of 
species whose fecundity is alarming, it can accomplish the mission 
of destruction which nature has ordained, without inflicting upon them 
any pain. It has neither teeth nor saw; none of those means of 
punishment with which the destroyers of the world are so abundantly 
provided. Suddenly absorbed in the depths of this moving crucible, 
they lose themselves, they swoon away, they undergo instantaneously 
the transformations of its grand chemistry. Most of the living matter 
on which the inhabitants of the Polar Seas support themselves—ceta- 
ceans, fishes, birds—have neither organism nor the means of suffering. 
