16 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
dence with the air of the mountains and the woods. The miasm 
of cities kills him. Liberty, action, and life in the sunshine are his 
first necessities. 
It is a holy and noble part, I repeat, that the Hunter plays in the 
history of humanity. Shall I tell whence springs the strong inter- 
est which attaches to the person of Hobinson Crusoe ? 
This prodigious interest depends on the fact that the history of 
the poor shipwrecked sailor represents to us unconsciously that of 
humanity, cast also, by the grand shipwreck of the fall, on a desolated 
and uncultivated earth ; of humanity, in conflict with destitution and 
ignorance, and ransoming itself from its condemnation by the Chase. 
The Hunter goes for more than three fourths in the success of 
Daniel De Foe’s book. Take from Eobinson his gun and his pow- 
der, there is no more romance. 
Oh, the love of liberty, of an untrammeled range, which blind 
legislators will not understand ! Oh, the happiness of the fields 
and of carelessness, and the shade of great woods, and sweet idle- 
ness in the sunshine, for a youth of twenty, strong and ardent, who 
has vegetated in the dark and muddy cross streets of the cities, 
and has suffered from the universal selfishness, and from his own 
misery, and from the misery of others. 
I inhabited the Mitidja, in 1842. I was the chief of the dis- 
trict at first most unhealthy, now the richest and best cultivated 
perhaps of all the Algerian districts. 
When the multiplied expeditions of the general governor had 
beat back the Emir beyond the frontiers of Morocco, the report 
was spread in the province of Algiers that the road from Medea to 
the capital was safe, and that isolated soldiers had traversed it 
without encumbrance. Immediately the spirit of adventure rekin- 
dled in the inhabitants of the feverish plain. The most enterpri- 
sing escaped from the fields, where the soldier is too much the 
master, and pushed toward the south. It was Spring, in the 
balmiest and most flower enameled days of the season of the Sun. 
The chief cook of the principal restaurant at Boufarik, disap- 
peared, an artist invaluable for the delicacy of his crab sauces, and 
