264 
PASSIONAL ZOOLOGY. 
away as a provision for hard times what he has already eaten 
once. Tims did the illustrious gourmands of Rome, the sensual 
city built by the children of the she wolf. The Russians, those 
brave soldiers who eat with high relish the candles given them 
for another purpose, the Russians and Cossacks in their admira- 
tion of the prodigies of our culinary industry, have revived in 
1814, this custom of the vomit. An Anglophobe, of veracity, has 
assured me that this dirty practice, only excusable in the wolf, 
who cannot count on a dinner to-morrow, does not lack partisans 
on the northern side of the channel. 
Hatred, cruel and implacable, has imputed as a crime to the 
wolf the desperate means to which he sometimes resorts to elude 
the pangs of hunger. 
As he has been seen eating earth in these seasons of famine, it 
has been concluded that when he filled himself with this innutri- 
tions substance it was only with a view to increase the weight of 
his body in order to have more momentum to master the large an- 
imals which he attacks, such as the ox and horse. 
And as he does not always seize the bull by the horns, he has 
been in this respect accused of cowardice. I have sometimes 
heard the Kabyles and the Arabs of Algiers, treated as assassins 
and cowards, under pretext that the barbarians who have neither 
cannon nor tactics, lay in ambush in the ravines to fire on the 
French troops instead of boldly facing them. 
Another such calumny is that of the cowardice of the wolf. 
The wolf is no coward : it is true that he will not uselessly expose 
his life, but that is wisdom and not cowardice. The smugglers 
and pirates are not cowards because they avoid open struggles with 
an enemy too superior in numbers ; such courage in this case w^ould 
be silliness. The wolf has never given himself out as an aspirant 
to the succession of Amadis of Gaul. Let us ask of him no more 
than he has promised us. 
True courage is characterized by coolness in presence of dan- 
ger ; now I know no animal which shows more coolness in danger 
than the wolf, and it is precisely for this reason that the wolf hunt 
is so interesting and so troublesome. 
Every year the district government makes great battues for the 
