THE CHASE. 846 
contemplate such sublime display. Far away from ever-restless 
city life, and its surging crowd and its tainted air, we love to 
breathe the air of freedom sweet and uncontaminated, where 
every breath revives the spirits, stimulates the circulation, awak- 
ens the dormant energies, and inspires new life within us. If 
this be savage life, then am Ia savage still. If these be traits 
of character inherited from remote barbaric ancestors, I rejoice 
that civilization has failed to strangle what in them was purest 
and most elevating. 
But the sportsman of the present day is admitted to a higher 
pleasure than those of ancient times could ever know. For this 
he is indebted to our civilization, which while it could nét eradi- 
cate in him a love of nature, has enabled him to understand na- 
ture,— to become a naturalist; to know about that nature which 
surrounds him, and which he loves so well; to appreciate the 
characteristics and the peculiarities of those objects whose chase 
and capture fills him with such a thrill of pleasure. When he 
has shot a bird, captured a quadruped, or taken a fish, he takes 
it up and examines it as he would a book full of knowledge, and 
is enabled to see its peculiarities, and discover its many points of 
beauty and harmony, which those who simply kill to eat, or per- 
haps from a love of blood and slaughter, can never see, or seeing 
could not appreciate, and so enjoy. 
The cougar seeks his prey to satisfy his hunger, the sportsman 
that he may study nature in her various phases and understand 
her harmonies ; the better he is qualified to do these, the higher 
will be his sense of pleasure at his captures. I am gratified to 
observe among modern sportsmen a more elevated tone, a higher 
culture, by which they the better understand the natural history 
of the various objects which they pursue. Of all men they have 
the greatest opportunities to observe the characteristics of the 
animals which they meet with in the chase, and the better they 
learn how to observe, the more will they observe and compare, 
and note down, and through them may we soon hope to gather a 
fund of scientific observations, which will leave far behind all 
that has been written or known of many of our most familiar 
animals. Even now he takes with him to his camp in the forest 
works on natural history, treating of those animals which he pro- 
poses to pursue, and critically compares his captures with the 
observations of the authors, and corrects or confirms their state- 
ments. To the pot hunter, who kills the game to sell as a butcher 
does a sheep, pursues it not because he is a lover of nature, and 
