318 ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES. 
upon a few specimens very audacious. It is a hundred, nay, a thou- 
sand to one, that so many millions of dead, once disinterred, will con- 
vict us of having erred, at least, through incomplete enwieration. 
Page 113. Man had perished a hundred times.—Here we trace 
one of the early causes of the limited confederacy originally existing 
between man and the animal—a compact forgotten by our ungrateful 
pride, and without which, nevertheless, the existence of man had 
been impossible. 
When the colossal birds whose remains we are constantly exhuming 
had prepared for him the globe, had subjugated the crawling, climbing 
life which at first predominated—when man came upon the earth to 
confront what remained of the reptiles, to confront those new but not less 
formidable inhabitants of our planet, the tiger and the lion—he found 
on his side the bird, the dog, and the elephant. 
At Alexandria may be seen the last few individuals of those 
giant dogs which could strangle a lion. It was not through terror 
that these formidable animals allied themselves with man, but 
through natural sympathy, and their peculiar antipathy to the feline 
race, the giant cat (the tiger or lion). 
Without the alliance of the dog against beasts of prey, and that 
of the bird against serpents and crocodiles (which the bird kills in 
the very egg), man had assuredly been lost. 
The useful friendship of the horse originated in the same cause. 
You may trace it in the indescribable and convulsive horror which 
every young horse experiences at the mere odour of the lion. He 
attaches, he surrenders himself to man. 
Had he not possessed the horse, the ox, and the camel—had he 
been compelled to bear on his back and shoulders the heavy burdens 
