JUST TRIBUTE TO THE BULL« 
119 
who contrary to the advice of all the ruminants and of all the cul- 
tivators of France, has declared the salt question perfectly foreign 
to agriculture, and the tax just on all points. 
There is but one excuse to make in favor of science, and of the 
chamber of peers. It is that the learned peer was stockholder in 
a glass-making company, where the salt employed paid no tax. 
He was in his right, this man of science, in sustaining that the salt 
tax was not too high. 
I think it will give my readers pleasure to hear that the report 
of M. Gay Lussac has been put into an opera buffa by the satirical 
poets and compositors of the planet Jupiter. — (Cardinal of Famil- 
ism and generator of the Bull.) — The work has obtained the 
maddest applauses of laughter. 
The bull, reduced to the condition of the ox, is the most pre- 
cious of all the servants of man. He helps him during his life, feeds 
him after his death, and turns to good account in every part. He 
is the emblem of useful and peaceful labor, the sight of the red 
flag — sign of war and blood — infuriates him, for inhuman war car- 
ries mourning and desolation under the roof of the laborer whom 
he supports ; and for the same reason he as well as the stag is 
irritated by the noise of trumpets, which please the ear of the war- 
like horse so much. He was the victim of honor in the solemn sa- 
crifices of Greece, the victim whose blood was to appease the anger 
of the gods, and to purify the country of every germ of infection. 
Saint Bernard compares the blood of Christ, which alone suf- 
fices to ransom all sinners, to that of the red cow, shed on the al- 
tars of the pagan Gods.^ 
* This may be better understood when it is known that the lamh, which 
Christ is called in the Scripture, and whose sacrifice is celebrated at the 
Easter holidays, at the time when the constellation Aries appears in the 
heavens ; is equivalent to this sign, the ram, as well as to that of the hull, 
by which three different names the same sign was called at different times’, 
among those nations who observed in common the rites of the old Mithriac 
religion, of which the Christian is one of the forms. The Sun, as he 
passed through the zodiacal sign of this constellation, was represented as 
the ram, lamb, or bull, and these creatures were slain in the sacrifices of 
Egypt or Persia, to commemmorate the decline of life in the winter 
months, when the sun has least power. — T r. 
