28 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
CHAPTEE II. 
EUKOPEAN" FEAN-CE ITS CLIMATE, USTHABITANTS, AKB 
ZOOLOGICAL SCHEDULE. 
France is a country favored by heaven. It is the country of 
noble hunters and noble thinkers — the country of the queen wo- 
man — of delicious wines and exquisite game. 
In no other country of the world has God sown more songs, 
treasures, and flowers. The spirit, the women, wines, and game 
of France are titled with a superior aroma — have a seal of their 
own, which will not allow them to be confounded with those of 
other growths and other countries. 
France is the warmest country on the globe in the same lati- 
tudes. The isothermal line that passes through Paris, situated 
under the forty-ninth degree, passes through Philadelphia, which 
lies under the fortieth, at the same distance from the equator as 
Naples. The latitude of Paris, where the grape and the peach 
ripen in the open air, is the same as that of Quebec, where the' 
mercury freezes. The average temperature of France is the same 
as that of England ; but neither the grape nor the peach will live 
in England. This is also a little the fault of the English popula- 
tion, a people devoted to trade and merchandise, and which has 
prohibited the rays of the sun in its island, in order to favor the 
consumption of the national coal. The English soil is only a sort 
of dark lantern. The admirable disposition of the superficies of 
the French territory explains these favors of temperature. High 
mountain chains, gradually rising from north to south, divide our 
soil into a vast series of deep and sheltered basins, almost always 
open at the south and closed to the north wind. These chains, 
although some of them are crowned with eternal snows, give rise to 
