2 ANIMAL LIFE 



until it is broken, and the Devonshire combe or West- 

 morland fell are images in exile. 



To this the animal life of a countryside offers a 

 sharp contrast. Its bulk, in a bird's-eye view, is in- 

 significant, its tenure of the ground is short. It is 

 evasive, and offers no large characters distinctive of 

 the highlands and lowlands, or of the cultivated and 

 open country. It is remote, and for the discovery of 

 its genius a closer attention and a minuter acquaint- 

 ance than the farmer's or gamekeeper's is requisite. 

 Its individuality is never wholly subdued by the 

 country around it or the breeder who cultivates it. 

 Alone among animals the horse and dog have been 

 trained to a willing understanding of man's wishes. 



Mass, stationariness, and pliability — the notes of 

 plant life — are replaced in animals by purposeful 

 evasion, activity, and intractability. The abundance 

 of animals, far from always giving the pleasure 

 wakened by the advent, growth, and even the decay 

 of rich masses of plant life, raises feelings of dis- 

 gust and alarm as often as those of satisfaction or 

 enjoyment. The evolutions of shoals of fish, the 

 concerted flight of birds, the winding homeward of a 

 herd of cattle, give but an evanescent sense of beauty 

 in comparison with the intimate sense of relief aroused 

 by the sight of a woodland after traversing stretches 

 of bare country. The sense of animal intractability is 

 enhanced when we discover in them no merely passive 

 feature of the scene, but independent and even hostile 

 beings. 



