164 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
child and of woman. Let us wait, in order to judge of the mild- 
ness or the intractableness of their character, to witness this previous 
emancipation. Every one now knows perfectly well that if woman 
had not reigned as absolute mistress under the shades of the royal 
garden of the French capital, the wild turtle-dove of the woods 
would never have left the shelter of the solitary forests to build 
its nest among the fragrant domes of the lindens and the chestnuts 
of the Tuilleries. 
What is true of the wild sheep is equally so of the wild goat, of 
the chamois, of the partridge, and the wild duck. All these spe- 
cies retained the love of man, so long as man did not abuse their 
noble confidence. They withdrew from him in proportion to the 
progress of his bloodthirsty wickedness. They will return to him 
with the improvement of his manners and under the reign of wo- 
man. Already under good administration and with the prevision 
of this future return, the murder of the wild goat, of the chamois, 
of the wild sheep, ought to be forbidden under the severest pen- 
alties, for the triple species will perish if the present generation 
does not cease its method of extermination. Now the wild goat, 
the wild sheep, the chamois, are the herds of the region of the 
clouds, the ornament and the life of the glaciers and of the pre- 
cipice, which the hand of man cannot fertilize; and the present 
generations have not the right of annihilating, to the injury of fu- 
ture generations, the capital of a property of which God had 
granted them only the interest or usufruct ! 
THE LYNX. 
The French Lynx has decidedly passed into a fabulous condi- 
tion. Buffon had already, toward the middle of the last century, 
erased it from the list of national beasts ; but history proves that 
it has been seen and shot since this erasure, especially in 1788, in 
the Cantal, where a hunter of Saint Flour killed one in a field 
near this town. The rare survivors of the proscribed race have, 
according to custom, sought refuge among the wooded gorges of 
the Pyrenees and the Alps ; they have sustained themselves there 
sometime, then disappeared like the carlin one fine day, without 
