PASSlO-^-AL ZOOLOGY. 
at the Spartans in Latin distichs, while my 3 "onng fellow-scholars 
celebrated, in pompous hexameters, their ancestors, their virtues, 
their rapine, and their love of black broth ; which was (by way of 
parenthesis) not a bad sort of a stew. 
The hunt was a privilege of caste before lY89, but the privilege 
was nobly exercised. The revolution of ’89, in destroying privi- 
lege, has unfortunately opened the way to the destruction of the 
game. The whole legislation of hunting is now to be made anew. 
The present chase, like every industry of subversive order, whether 
savage, barbarous, or civilized, is afflicted with seven lymbic scourges, 
called poverty, fraud, oppression, carnage, outrageous bad weather, 
diseases artificially provoked, vicious circle ; seven plagues which 
pivot upon general selfishness and duplicity of action. Nothing 
i^ actually poorer and more depopulated than our country and 
forests of France. Where are the buffalo and the urus, the elk, 
the reindeer, the fallow deer, the stag, the bear, the wild boar, the 
wild goat? Where are the great and the small bustards, the 
Guernsey partridge ? Even the hare and the common partridge 
may be counted everywhere. The quail, tired of the war of ex- 
termination which the European populations have waged against 
it, sometimes decides on leaving the continent for whole years. I 
know fields in France where the lark no longer sings, and great 
woods where the nightingale, the robin, and the white-throated 
warbler cease to nestle every year. The domain of the becafico, 
and that of the ortolan, grows narrower eveiy day, at the same 
time with that of the vine, the fig tree, and the olive. The snipe 
and the water rail fly before the deplorable draining of our marshes ; 
the duck and the teal seek running waters more hospitable than 
those of the Somme and the Seine. France, the beautiful country, 
favored by Heaven, and destined, by the diversity of its tempera- 
ture and the delicacy of its fruits, to be the favorite dwelling of 
all the juicy game, France has become a frightful cut-throat for 
all the Lord’s creatures, where the boldest travelers tremble as 
they alight. It is sad. I know, in the whole city of Paris, a city 
seven leagues in circumference, and provided with numberless 
monuments, only four or five miserable colonies of swallows. 
Now the insects, freed from the police of the little birds, of the 
