DEPARTTJKE OF NOBLE RACES. 
57 
How times are changed, and how two or three thousand years, 
still less, sometimes suffice to alter the physiognomy of things ! 
Go, then, to ask for the elk and the buffalo of the woods of Ro- 
mainville, or the orbs of the gerfalcon of the fields of air ! De- 
cline, alas 1 too rapid. From the first days of the Roman invasion 
the elk commenced its retreat toward the Baltic ; the elk placed the 
Rhine between himself and the Gaul ; Csesar still meets him in the 
Hyrcanian forest, in company with the ^^machlisy The reindeer 
is cantoned on the other side the icy mountains of Helvetia and 
of the Cantabria. 
The two noble races disturbed by the floods of civilization, have 
been chased from retreat to retreat, even beyond the boreal re- 
gions and the extreme of Cape North. They have stopped in their 
flight only where the land failed beneath their feet. 
“ Hie tandem steterimt, illis ubi defuit orbis!” 
There are learned men who will not have it that the reindeer of 
Lapland and the elk of Norway have ever trodden with their large 
hoof the soil of Gaul. I have very often asked myself vrhat inter- 
est a learned man could have in refusing to the ancestors of the 
reindeer and the elk, which now inhabit Finland, the pleasure of 
browsing the young shoots of the oaks of Gaul two thousand years 
ago. It has always been impossible for me to answer this in a 
satisfactory manner. The elk is still at this day found in the north 
of Russia in Europe, in Finland, and in the government of Arch- 
angel ; it is not invisible either in Sweden or in Norway. The 
King of Prussia keeps a superb herd of them in one of the islands 
of the Niemen. 
Of the bison, also, they have made a myth — the bison celebra- 
ted in all the chronicles of Merovingian and Carlovingian France, 
and with which all the ancient naturalists occupied themselves — 
Aristotle, Pausanias, Pliny ; the bison, so dear to the pleasures of 
the great king Charlemagne, they have denied — denied for the 
reason that they do not know it. Neither do I know perfectly 
the animal designated under the name of bison ; but that is no rea- 
son why I should deny it. Is this bison the same as the bonasos 
of Aristotle, which bears a tufted mane like the lion, but whose 
