162 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY, 
fantine creatures — more innocent than lambs — more gamesome 
than kittens — tender nurselings, alas ! which the love of their poor 
mothers does not always succeed in saving from the formidable 
claw of the Eagle and of the vulture. We shall see in another 
volume, at the article Eagle or Lammergeyer, that Pliny was right 
in accusing certain eagles of picking out the eyes of stags in or- 
der to master them. The wild sheep -of Corsica, less nimble than 
the chamois, has the dome and shelter of the forests, of which the 
inhabitant of the glaciers is deprived. I have heard them speak 
at the Jardin des Plantes, of the fierce and intractable humor of 
the wild sheep, which they compared to the zebra for its inflexi- 
bility of character. In its natal country, on the contrary, they 
boast of its mildness, and its compatriots assert that the wild sheep, 
taken young, is as easily tamed and follows its master with the 
same docility as the water-spaniel. The sheep reproduces in cap- 
tivity : a sure sign of its tendency to rally again to man, with 
whom once before it concluded a treaty of union. I have often 
been asked with respect to this, why these freaties, so common in 
earlier epochs, have become so rare. 
The answer is very simple. There is no animal, I have replied, 
that does not love man in secret, and which, when amiably ques- 
tioned, will not confess at last that its most ardent ambition is to 
serve its legitimate sovereign, and to be employed by him. 
Unfortunately the hostile attitude which man has taken toward 
all the beasts, now no longer permits these tender confidences. At 
the beginning, during the happy days of the paradisaical era, and 
when no creature felt the outrageous desire of feeding on the 
blood or flesh of another, the confidence of the beast in man was 
in the natural order. 
The animal had yet no reasons to conceal its inclinations, and 
the painter’s brush, as well as the poet’s lyre, has loved to retrace 
the touching images of that edifying concord which existed be- 
tween man and beast in those distant times. But the master has 
often since that broken the bonds of this cordial understandinof : 
he has thrown too many extra stabs in the contract ; he has pro- 
voked sanguinary reprisals so far and so often that distrust and re- 
sentment have at last entered the soul of the victims, and turned 
