BIRDS OF PREY. 165 
they hoot him; they give him chase; profiting by his embarrassment, 
they persecute him to death. 
There is no form of association by which they do not know how 
to profit. That which is sweetest—the family—does not induce them 
to forget, as you may see, the confederacy for defence or the league 
for attack. On the contrary, they associate themselves even with 
their superior rivals, the vultures, and call, precede, or follow them, 
to feed at their expense. They unite—and this is a stronger illustra- 
tion—with their enemy the eagle; at least, they surround him to 
profit by his combats, by the fray in which he triumphs over some 
great animal, These shrewd spectators wait at a little distance until 
the eagle has feasted to his satisfaction, and gorged himself with 
blood; when this takes place, he flies away, and the remainder falls 
to the crows. 
Their evident superiority over so great a number of birds is due 
to their longevity and to the experience which their excellent memory 
enables them to acquire and profit by. Very different to the majority 
of animals, whose duration of life is proportionable to the duration of 
their infancy, they reach maturity at the end of a year, and live, it is 
said, a century. 
The great variety of their food, which includes every kind of 
animal or vegetable nutriment, every dead or living prey, gives them 
a wide acquaintance with things and seasons, harvests and hunts. 
They interest themselves in everything, and observe everything. The 
ancients, who lived far more completely than ourselves in and with 
nature, found it no small profit to follow, in a hundred obscure things 
where human experience as yet affords no light, the directions of so 
prudent and sage a bird. 
With due submission to the noble Raptores, the crow, which 
frequently guides them, despite his “inky suit”’ and uncouth visage, 
despite the coarseness of appetite imputed to him, is not the less the 
superior genius of the great species of which he is, in size, already a 
diminution. 
But the crow, after all, represents only utilitarian prudence, the 
