146 PURIFICATION. 
by the conditions of atmosphere and temperature ; essentially hygro- 
metrical, they are living barometers. The morning’s humidity 
burdens their heavy wings; the weakest prey at that hour might 
pass with impunity before them. So great is their subjection to ex- 
ternal nature, that the American species, perched in uniform ranks on 
the cocoa-nut branches, follow, as we have said, the exact hour when 
the leaves fold up, retire to rest long before evening, and only awake 
when the sun, already high above the horizon, re-opens the leaves of 
the tree and their white, heavy eyelids. 
These admirable agents of that beneficent chemistry which preserves 
and balances life here below, labour for us in a thousand places where 
we ourselves may never penetrate. We clearly discern their presence 
and their services in our towns; but no one can measure the full 
extent of their benefits in those deserts where every breath of the 
winds is death. In the fathomless forest, in the deep morasses, under 
the impure shadow of mangoes and mangroves, where ferment the 
corpses of two worlds, dashed to and fro by the sea, the great purify- 
ing army seconds and shortens the action both of the waves and the 
insects. Woe to the inhabited world, if their mysterious and unknown 
toil ceased but for an instant ! 
In America these public benefactors are protected by the law. 
Egypt does more for them; she reveres, she loves them. If the 
ancient worship no longer exists, they receive from men as kindly an 
hospitality as in the time of Pharaoh. Ask an Egyptian fellah why 
he allows himself to be infested and deafened by birds? why he so 
patiently endures the insolence of the crow posted on his buffalo’s 
horn or his camel’s hump, or gathering on the date-palms in flocks 
and beating down the fruit ?—he will answer nothing. To the bird 
everything is lawful. Older than the Pyramids, he is the ancient 
inhabitant of the country. Man is there only through his instrument- 
ality ; he could not exist without the persistent toil of the ibis, the 
stork, the crow, and the vulture. 
Hence arises an universal sympathy for the animal, an instinctive 
tenderness for all life, which, more than anything else, makes the 
