40 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
organize tlie massacre of the game, they could not have done 
better. 
Outrageous weather is not less a cause of ruin for the game of 
France. In the times of King David, the heavens declared the 
glory of God ; they seem at present only to declare the glory of 
Satan ; for it might well be said, that chance, and no longer Prov- 
idence, regulates the order of the seasons. There are no longer 
any seasons in France. I have often seen the cold of winter con- 
tinue until the summer solstice, and the lilac in flower at this epoch ; 
another year, the winter forgot to come. In 1845 the crops per- 
ished with rot ; in 1846, with drouth ; and a fearful famine ensued, 
which caused gold to flow in streams into the coffers of the mo- 
nopolizers, and thousands of unfortunates to perish Avith hunger. 
What an insult, what a shame for Man, who calls himself the 
king of nature, and who cannot even order his clouds to rain when 
it is needed, and His seasons to equipoise themselves and keep their 
order 1 Whence proceed these miseries of unseasonable weather ? 
I have already explained — from the ill-considered felling of forests 
on mountain summits and their declivities — from the stupid care- 
lessness of government and the governed. When the water of 
clouds has burst upon the hill-sides without having been divided by 
any other surface than the bare rock — when the brook becomes a 
torrent and the river a sea — the brook and the torrent have car- 
ried off, and rolled pell-mell in their waves, the bodies of par- 
tridges, rabbits, and hares, with those of man’s herds and his fur- 
niture. 
The heathcock, the hazel hen, the dove, the Avild boar, the roe- 
buck, have disappeared with the hemlock and the oak ; the bird 
of passage no longer dares to stop in this denuded, barren, shel- 
terless country. Another disastrous consequence of these abrupt 
transitions from a Siberian spring to a summer of Senegal ; the 
tissues of plants that God had not prepared for these rude trials, 
are disorganized by the too frequent repetition of these shocks ; 
plants and grains have contracted germs of disease, Avhich they 
have communicated to the blood of animals nourished by them, 
even to that of man. The cold rains have killed the young coveys, 
the rot has attacked the rabbits and hares. 
