1886.] The Torture of the Fish-Hawk. 223 
THE TORTURE OF THE FISH-HAWK. 
BY I, LANCASTER. 
HILE engaged in the task of explaining the mystery of the 
flight of soaring birds on the shores of the Gulf of Mexico, 
where many species abounded, unusual and astonishing perform- 
ances were witnessed on the part of these inhabitants of the air. 
The month of March revealed more of these out-of-the-way 
feats than other times of the year, and as the breeding season 
occurred in this month, especially on those remote keys and in- 
terminable flats constituting the peninsula of Southern Florida, it 
was fair to `presume that feelings growing out of the relations of 
the sexes prompted the remarkable behavior. 
Were it not absurd to transfer to external nature those moral 
€motions generated in the mind from the primordial impressions 
of pleasure and pain, one would be tempted to assert a radical 
diabolism in the scheme of things on witnessing the seeming 
fiendishness of some of these creatures having dominion of the 
air. Nothing but a free application of the doctrine of the trans-. 
mission of qualities through inheritance, coupled with variations 
amounting to divergence, as the line descends, can dispose of 
deliberately evil intention somewhere, or of a natural process, the 
outcome of which is bad. No inference from the hooked beak 
and grasping talons of the carnivorous birds gives a clue to the 
origin and development of a disposition on their part to inflict 
pain for the mere sake of the torture. Those structures find 
their function in the legitimate life struggle, but the infliction of 
needless pain, in no way connected with that conflict, seems to be 
imposed from another source, 
_ The distribution of land and water on the Gulf coast of Florida 
is favorable to the existence of fish. The interminable flats, bare, 
Or covered with a thin sheet of water at low tide, and traversed 
by many winding channels, give the smaller kinds refuge from 
the rapacity of the larger, and furnish breeding grounds without 
The many tidal creeks, often a succession of deep holes 
connected by mere rivulets, through which the tide sluggishly 
and flows, also give security for the deposit of eggs and 
‘Srowth of young. The gulf is also a vast caldron of warm 
water, Prolific through its whole extent in monsters of the deep, 
many of which, such as sharks and porpoises, penetrate the passes 
