FAREWELL TO THE NOBLE GAME. 
69 
a frightful deluge of pernicious insects, spiders, scorpions, and 
maddened wolves, that scattered desolation and terror everywhere. 
But, according to all the writers of the time, the worst of these 
scourges is still the Norman, ancestor of the English lord. 
The last remains of the family of the urus now wander under 
the chilly shades of the Lithuanian hemlocks. The individual 
given by the Emperor Napoleon to the museum of the Jardin- 
des-Plantes, came from these forests. The Polish bisons which 
the Emperor of Russia sends to the London garden of beasts to 
vex the French government, are uruses. 
The glutton and the panther had emigrated in the suite of the 
elk and the reindeer, their chosen victims. From this time they 
appear very rarely in the history of Central Europe. 
The black bear, the silver wolf, the blue fox, were totally 
eclipsed ; or perhaps not zealous to preserve a splendid fur 
which made them too many enemies, they renounced these robes 
of luxury for the modest costume of their indigenous congeners. 
Tiie stag, the fallow deer — delights of the royal chase — have per- 
ished in the fall of the royal hunt. We still find in the parks of 
commissaries or contractors — the kinoes of our time — a few individ- 
uals escaped as by a miracle from revolutionary vengeance ; for it 
is the game of the government which generally pays in France 
for the faults of princes. 
The race of the wmlf would have long since disappeared from the 
French soil, as it has disappeared from England, but for the tute- 
lar institution of the Louveterie, a salaried corporation of high and 
potent wolf-hunters, as their name indicates. The wild boar is 
near its end, like the wolf — the roebuck not yet. 
The lynx has ended in France with the eighteenth century. 
I do not despair of meeting, on the subject of the beaver of the 
Seine, a very learned member of some institute, who will demon- 
strate to me that it is not the individuals of this family who have 
built the two bridges of Jena and of Austerlitz. I reply in ad- 
vance to this specious objection, that it is absolutely impossible to 
judge of the intellectual capacity and the physical means of the 
indigenous beaver by the individuals that now remain with us — 
sad wreck of a dispersed people, that misfortune has caused 
