156 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
For cause analogous, though against my principles, I have ac- 
corded to the fox an honor refused to the bear. The historian 
may protest against the injustice of facts, but his first duty is to 
record them. 
THE WILD MOUNTAIN GOAT. 
The Creator has disinherited no land of beaut}’’ and of life. 
Above those regions where respirable air fails man, still sail the 
eagle and the lammergeyer, and bounds the chamois. Afar be- 
neath the twilight heaven of the poles, beyond the confines of the 
regions of light amid the eternal ices, immense lands lie lost en- 
closed by solid seas. There, among the snowy steppes of Spitz- 
bergen and of Nova Zembla, wander numerous hordes of reindeer, 
that browze the moss under ivory tusks, rich relics of the gigantic 
animal kingdom which peopled these coasts before the last cata- 
clysm. On the floor of the floating glacier which the explosion 
of frost has detached from some mountain side, the white bear 
navigates, and sea cows, monstrous amphibia of semi-human 
form, with tusks like elephants, sleep peacefully ; and the gay 
pinion which would accompany the sun to the end of its course, 
and double the pole with him, teaches the echoes of that sullen 
solitude to repeat its sprightly air, and marries its songs of glad- 
ness to the sinister screams of the harfang, and to the bleating 
of the reindeer, sole voices of these desolate plains. 
Meanwhile the giant manchot, erect on the extreme shores of 
the Arctic Sea, seems a sentinel watching over the ramparts of 
a citadel of ice, or an orator declaiming before a learned assem- 
bly. Here shines in all its luster, that providential wisdom so 
often revealed to the naturalist. That* absolute depopulation 
might nowhere take place, God has proportioned among His 
creatures the love of their natal soil to the rigors of the climate. 
Thus while the reindeer, the Laponian, the dog of Siberia, can 
only live in the regions of frost, the inhabitants of the fortunate 
zones leave their country without regret. 
Thus among those legions of helots whom the executioners of 
barbarous societies annually recruit to forge their standing armies 
— guaranty of their tyranny — those in which homesickness makes 
