118 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
merit reserved to the aristocracy. After some months of this diet 
the condemned perished by entozoa. Visit in the winter season 
the stables of poor cultivators of France, and you will find all the 
animals devoured by vermin on account of their poor feed, together 
with the privation of salt. Most of the parasite insects, the rot, 
the glanders, proceed from the impoverishment of the blood, and 
have no other cause than the bad quality of the food, which would 
be at once rectified by a small addition of salt. The same causes 
produce the same effects on the horse, the hog, and the dog, 
though they do not seem to seek for salt as eagerly as the sheep 
and the ox. We may one day discover that hydrophobia devel- 
ops itself in dogs in consequence of an inflammation of the salivary 
glands, produced by too long an abstinence from salted food. 
The deer of North America, instructed by nature, every year 
at a certain epoch make journeys of three or four hundred miles, 
to lick salt on the shores of the salt lakes. Tradition has taught 
them that this was the only means of ridding themselves of the 
myriads of wood-tics that cling in bunches to their skins. 
Some years ago, all the roebucks of the beautiful country seat 
of Yaux, belonging to M. de Praslin Barbe-Bleue, died of this pest. 
Formerly, when many fallow deer were kept in the royal for- 
ests, they took care to fix at convenient places little mounds of 
clay and salt rubbed together, where all the deer came to lick. 
This efficacy of salt — emblem of purity and wealth — against 
vermin — emblem of misery and corruption — is generally understood 
by the animals. Every one knows the passion of the pigeon for 
salt. The best means of captivating -the fugitive and retaining 
him in the dove-cot, is to adorn his dwelling from time to time 
with a well-salted tail of codfish, or still better, with a surloin of 
roasted fox, richly saltpetred. 
The pigeon, as well as the sheep and goat, picks at walls for the 
saltpetre which sometimes effloresces from them. The fugitive 
pigeon, prey to a swarm of miseries, is too faithful an emblem of 
the fate of first loves in civilization. 
Official science will have trouble in washing its hands of the 
odious part it has played in this question of the salt, for it is one 
of its most illustrious contributors, M. Gay Lussac, peer of France, 
