PURIFICATION. 145 
solitary, and without communication—mostly silent—they flock to 
the banquet by the hundred, and nothing disturbs them. They 
quarrel not among themselves, they take no heed of the passer-by. 
They imperturbably accomplish their functions in a stern kind of 
gravity ; with decency and propriety ; the corpse disappears, the skin 
remains, In a moment a frightful mass of putrid fermentation, which 
man had never dared to draw near, has vanished—has re-entered the 
pure and wholesome current of universal life. 
It is strange that the more useful they are to us, the more odious 
we find them. We are unwilling to accept them for what they are, 
to regard them in their true réle, as the beneficent cressets of living 
fire through which nature passes everything that might corrupt the 
higher life. For this purpose she has provided them with an admir- 
able apparatus, which receives, destroys, transforms, without ever 
rejecting, wearying, or even satisfying itself. Let them devour a 
hippopotamus, and they are still famished. To the gulls (those 
vultures of the sea) a whale seems but a reasonable morsel! They 
will dissect it and clear it away better than the most skilful whalers. 
As long as aught of it remains they remain; fire at them, and they 
intrepidly return to it in the mouth of your guns. Nothing dislodges 
the vulture on the carcass of a hippopotamus. Levaillant killed one 
of these birds, which, though mortally wounded, still plucked away 
scraps of flesh. Was he starving? Not he; food was found in his 
stomach weighing six pounds ! 
This is automatic gluttony, rather than ferocity. If their aspect is 
sad and sombre, nature has favoured them for the most part with a 
delicate and feminine ornament, the soft white down about their 
neck. . 
Standing before them, you feel yourself in the presence of the 
ministers of death; but of death tranquil and natural, and not of 
murder. Like the elements, they are serious, grave, inaccusable, at 
bottom innocent—rather, let us say, deserving. Though gifted with 
a vital force which resumes, subdues, absorbs everything, they are 
subiect, more than any other beings, to general influences ; are swayed 
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