214 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
How many obstacles for the inventor to surmount before having 
perfected his work ! Then the pangs in causing his discovery to 
be accepted. What sufferings swallowed in solitude ! The in- 
ventor is also endowed with the sad gift of tears. And the em- 
blem of the persecuted student, the crown imperial, bears these 
tears congealed at the bottom of its calyx ! The stag brought 
with him at birth only the rudiments of his head-dress, whose per- 
fect and regular development represents the industrial series adorn- 
ed with its pivot. Even as the brain of the inventor is every year 
enriched by some new acquisitions, so the head of the stag ought 
to increase with age by new antlers. 
The brocket, stag of one year, replaces the fawn and the haire, 
corresponding to our spikebuck : the second head has succeeded to the 
brocket, the third head to the second; i\iQ fourth head to the third, 
ten prong scant ; the fourth head is the full head, ten prong. 
Now each of these metamorphoses has been for the unhappy 
beast a painful crisis. It has also been obliged to retire into soli- 
tude, and, far from all inspection, to ripen its work in quiet (to re- 
form its head) ; but hardly has it reappeared in the lists, proud 
of the new perfection of its procedures, when it suddenly finds it- 
self the butt of the toothed arrows of envy, of the attacks of com- 
petition, of the cupidity of the hunters. 
For the stag that lost his horns in March has re-formed them in 
June, and this is the season when the pasture is dainty, and when 
stag venison comes in. 
Tayaut ! Tayaut ! Hear the war-cry of the hunters, and the 
deafening noise of the horns. 
It is a full head that flies before the pack, and for him the era 
of persecution opens. 
In proportion as his head is enriched and his noble brow made 
illustrious, so does the number of his persecutors increase. So 
long as he was but a brocket, young, and carrying light weight of 
science, the hunters hardly troubled themselves about him. His 
obscurity was his safety, and then the weight of existence is so 
easy to bear in the morning of life, and his hamstrings were so 
strong, so supple ! Wait till he grows, they say, till he becomes 
fat and heavy, for now the game will hardly pay. Then behold 
