BIRDS OF PREY. 157 
mous prices which the falcon fetches, seems to prove that the 
former, the noblest of the raptores, has now-a-days nearly disappeared. 
Thus nature gravitates towards a less violent order. Does this 
mean that death will ever diminish? Death! no; but pain surely. 
The world little by little falls under the power of the Being who 
alone understands the useful equilibrium of life and death, who can 
regulate it in such wise as to maintain the scale even between the 
living species, to encourage them according to their merit or innocence 
—to simplify, to soften, and (if I may hazard the word) to moralize 
death, by rending it swift, and freeing it from anguish. 
Death was never our serious objection. Is it more than a simple 
mask of life’s transformations? But pain is an objection, grave, 
cruel, terrible. Therefore, little by little, it will disappear from the 
earth. Its agents, the fierce executioners of the life which they 
plucked out by torture, are already very rare. 
Assuredly, when J survey, in the Museum, the sinister assemblage 
of nocturnal and diurnal birds of prey, I do not much regret the 
destruction of these species. Whatever pleasure our personal in- 
stincts of violence, our admiration of strength, may cause us to take 
in these winged robbers, it is impossible to misread in their deathlike 
masks the baseness of their nature. Their. pitifully flattened skulls 
are sufficient evidence that, though greatly favoured with wing, and 
crooked beak, and talons, they have not the least need to make use 
of their intelligence. Their constitution, which has made them 
swiftest of the swift, strongest of the strong, has enabled them to dis- 
pense with address, stratagem, and tactic. As for the courage with 
which one is tempted to endow them, what occasion have they to 
display it, since they encounter none but inferior enemies? Enemies? 
no; victims! When the rigour of the season, or hunger, drives their 
young to emigrate, it leads to the beak of these dull tyrants count- 
less numbers of innocents, very superior in every sense to their 
murderers; it prodigalizes the birds which are artists, and singers, 
and architects, as a prey to these vulgar assassins; and for the eagle 
and the buzzard provides a banquet of nightingales. 
