196 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
bear was seen to carry an unfortunate hunter to the highest point 
of a rock and to precipitate him from it in full view of the whole 
retinue. The same author tells us of that noble defense of a bear, 
who seeing himself attacked by a great number of dogs and a 
hail of arrows, backed himself up against a rock, picked up the 
arrows that were shot at him, and hurled them with remarkable 
coolness against those who had shot them. There is something 
similar to this in the authentic narrative of the famous bear-hunt, 
near Oleron in Berne, in 1781, where a bear, wounded by several 
balls, killed half a dozen of the marksmen and tore his gun from 
the hands of another who was aiming at him. Since the inven- 
tion of fire-arms, however, the bear-hunt has lost immensely, both 
in danger and dramatic interest. 
It is now a -chase as prosaic as that of the wild boar, and much 
less amusing, for dogs are rarely employed in it. It sometimes 
happens that the wounded animal turns against the maiksman, 
and if he loses his presence of mind, or is not succored in time, 
the beast avenges himself ; but the examples of those desperate 
struggles in articulo mortis^ on the brink of abysses, unfortunate- 
ly become rarer every day. 
Bears have scarce been seen for the last hundred years in the 
Yosges or the Jura, or among the Apennines, and we may pre- 
dict at no distant day their disappearance from the Pyrenees and 
the Alps. 
To arrest this destruction — to give a truce from this persecu- 
tion, there must first be an arrest in the advancement of the cit- 
izen power, which is formalized by the institution of the bear- 
skin cap, and nothing, alas ! presages the speedy disappearance 
of this monstrous head-dress, so heating and heavy for the grena- 
dier of the National Guards, and so fatal to the bear. 
The bear has not always been confined to snowy mountains. It 
seems to have flourished on the banks of the Oise in France in the 
time of the Merovingians. 
The forest of Bearfield is situated at the northern extreme of 
that delta, full of game, which the rivers of the Oise and the Aisne 
form before uniting. It has seen fine days before and since the 
invasion of the Romans. It is the northern limit of the French 
