66 nothing else. The domestic cats left the houses, and assumed the air of wild animals, slinking from the sight of man, with a shy secrecy in their motions, an apparent affectation of fear quite ludicrous to see." The armadillos learned to catch mice. A tame one would hunt for their nests like a pointer, until he discovered the exact spot where the mice lurked, when he would stop, and creep cautiously to it, and then spring suddenly forwards, throwing his body like a trap over the nest of mice concealed in the grass. One story of Mr. Hudson's gives a good example of the difference in brain-power between animals of the same species. His children had made the discovery that some excite ment and fun was to be had by placing a long, hollow stalk of the giant thistle with a mouse in it before a cat, and watching her movements. The cat would dash alternately at either end of the stalk, the mouse, of course, rushing to the other. All the cats acted thus except one. This, instead of becoming excited like the rest, deliberately bit a long piece out of the stalk with its teeth, then another strip; and so on progressively until the entire stick had been opened up to within a few inches of the end, when the mouse came out and was caught. But perhaps the strangest change induced by the plague of mice was in the habits of the owls. Enormous numbers of these birds assembled, both short-eared owls and the small prairieowl; and forty or fifty of the former might be seen wheeling round the house at one time. The extremely prosperous times on which the owls had fallen made them forget all natural precautions; and they actually nested and brought up their young in the middle of winter! The cause of the disappearance of the plague in La Plata was a very dry winter, which destroyed the grass and reduced the surface of the pampas to dust. Cover and food thus disappeared, and the mice were destroyed, but by a process which also caused the deaths of millions of sheep and cattle. Had the winter been less severe, so as to reduce the quantity of grass without destroying it, the trained army of persecutors which had assembled, and increased as the mice increased, would probably have brought their numbers to the normal level, without the interference of a natural calamity. There is evidence that the same process has begun in Scotland; and the drought of the present spring, aided by the hawks and owls which are now encouraged instead of being shot, may, if followed by a severe winter, end the plague, before the committee have risen from their deliberations. From The Speaker. THE LAST DUKE OF YORK. THE resurrection of the historic title of Duke of York in the person of Prince George of Wales is an interesting instance of the persistence of national traditions. Ever since the union of the Houses of Lancaster and York by the marriage of Henry VII. it has been regarded as the most appropriate title for the second son of the reigning sovereign; it was borne by Henry VIII. and Charles I. until the untimely deaths of their elder brothers, the Princes Arthur and Henry, made them heirs to the throne and Princes of Wales; and by James II. until the death of his elder brother, Charles II. George II. broke through the tradition by creating his second son Duke of Cumberland, but he revived the ancient title a few months before his death, and conferred it on his grandson, Edward Augustus, the second son of Frederick, Prince of Wales, and next brother to George III. This young prince died at Monaco in 1768, and George III., observing the usual custom, conferred the title on his second son, Frederick Augustus. During the present reign, however, the precedent was ignored, and the newfangled title of Duke of Edinburgh was selected for the queen's second son. It was rumored at the time that this departure from customary usage was due to the fact that its last possessor had attached an unsavory reputation to the grand old title, which would have made its resurrection unpopular. There can be no doubt that the last Duke of York was much detested at the close of his life, owing to the attitude he took up in the House of Lords of strong opposition to Catholic Emancipation, and that the dislike felt for his political views obscured his real services to the State, and made him anything but a persona grata to the majority of the people of England. Yet he was one of the most striking figures of the epoch in which Great Britain dauntlessly faced Napoleon, the conqueror of Europe; and now that a sufficient period has elapsed to forget the political animosities of the agitation for Catholic Emancipation and Parliamentary Reform, it is possible to judge the whole career of the last Duke of York more leniently and more justly. Most Englishmen are aware that the last Duke of York was commander-inchief of the army from the existence of his column and of the school for soldiers' sons which bear his name. Some, who are versed in the chronique scandaleuse of the present century, know that he was accused in Parliament of allowing his mistress, Mrs. Clarke, to traffic in military commissions. Few know that he was the man who reorganized the British army, and that to him is chiefly due the creation of the splendid fighting force which illustrated the military prowess of this country in the Peninsula, and which its commander, the Duke of Wellington, declared could go anywhere and do anything. It is true that in this work he was aided by men of great and varied ability: Sir David Dundas drew up new codes of tactics based on modern principles of war; Sir Ralph Abercromby in the field and in home commands endeavored to restore the morale of the army; Sir John Moore trained and disciplined the troops, which were to be the élite of the Peninsular army, in Shorncliffe camp; and the heads of the departments at the Horse Guards, Sir Harry Calvert, father of the present Sir Harry Verney, as adjutant-general, Sir Robert Brownrigg, and Sir Willoughby Gordon, as quartermasters-general successively, and Sir Henry Torrens, as military secretary, all labored unceasingly in their different lines. Such work is not showy, like winning victories or storming cities, and for that very reason it needs to be insisted on with the more pertinacity. Generals in the field are but too apt to complain of the support they receive from the home authorities, and their complaints are handed down for the information of posterity. Yet it would be most unfair to credit all the strictures passed by Wellington, for instance, in his despatches on the management of the Horse Guards administration, without seeing what the other side has to say. The difficulties in the way of transforming the English army of the eighteenth century, fettered by antiquated notions and customs, into the admirable force, which exhibited its valor on many other fields than those of the Peninsula during the last years of the great war with Napoleon, were enormous; and due credit has never yet been given to the services of the admirable officials who were at the head of the different military departments in Whitehall during the change, or to the chief, to whom they were all fondly attached, Frederick, Duke of York. It is time, and more than time, that such scandals as the Clarke Inquiry were forgotten, and honor given to those to whom honor is mainly due for the victories of Wellington, of which modern Englishmen are justly proud, to those who created the English army in the shape in which it defeated the French, and in which it remained until the era of the Cardwell reforms. He Frederick Augustus, Duke of York, was, as has been said, the second son of George III. He was also that king's favorite son, and it is no small testimony to the amiability of his character, that he was also the favorite brother of the Prince of Wales, afterwards George IV. was from childhood intended for the army, and spent much time in Prussia studying the organization of the famous Prussian army. At Potsdam he fell in love with the princess_royal of Prussia, the eldest daughter of Frederick William II., whom he married in 1791. His handsome face and gracious manners made him at this time the idol of the people as well as of his father, and his popularity was increased by the reputation he had obtained for personal courage in waiving his rank and going to fight a duel with Colonel Lennox, afterwards Duke of Richmond, in 1789. In 1793, at the age of thirty, the young Duke of York was placed in command of the English army, despatched to the Netherlands to assist the Austrians in driving the French Republicans back to France. The campaign commenced with the defeat of Dumouriez, and the capture of Valenciennes by the allies; then the commanders quarrelled; the Duke of York drew off to besiege Dunkirk, and was defeated at Hindschoten; the Austrians were defeated at Wattignies; eventually in 1794 the allied armies were driven through Belgium. The victorious Republicans, ignoring the courtesies of war, carried on the campaign in the winter; they burst into Holland, across the frozen streams; and in 1795 the remains of the British army returned home, disorganized and defeated. The campaign of 1793-95 thus briefly summariza must be carefully studied by any one who would have an idea of the utter impossibility of an adequate resistance being offered by the English army, in its then antiquated condition, to the French Republican army with its mobility and rapidity of movement, its new strat egy, and its new tactics. Unfortunately, the only modern book which gives anything like a useful account of it, Sir Frederick Hamilton's "History of the Grenadier Guards," is so expensive as to be generally inaccessible, and as the study of defeats, however instructive, is not so palatable as the study of victories, it is hardly to be expected that the true history of the war in the Netherlands in 1793-95 will ever be known so well to English readers as that of the Peninsular War. On his return to England, the Duke of York was in 1795 made commander-inchief of the army by George III. He proved the right man in the right place. Old Lord Amherst, his predecessor though a brilliant general in his day, had become senile and maladministrative, and hopeless conservatism reigned in every department at the Horse Guards. The Duke of York perceived and this is his great meritthe need of a thorough change. His high rank, his influence at court, and his youthful vigor, seconded all reforms. Not only clothing, equipments, and arms were modernized, but the whole British military system was reorganized; young men were pushed forward to take the place of aged staff officers in the field; generals were selected for command by merit, instead of seniority; colonels of regiments were obliged to show on parade as many men as they received pay for; and the soldier was treated as a human being, not as a convicted ruffian. The demoralization caused by the American War of Independence, and the first contact with the French Republicans, was ended, and men like Abercromby and Moore were able to impart a spirit of discipline to the new levies, and to form armies from them imbued with confidence and constancy, with courage and obedience. In 1799, for the second and last time, the Duke of York commanded an army in the field. This was in the expedition to the Helder, in which he acted in conjunction with a Russian force. The operations are well described in the popular distich: The Duke of York, with twice ten thousand men, Marched up a hill, and then marched down again. But during the marches to and from Bergen he fought four hotly contested battles, which led to no result, mainly owing to dissensions with the Russians. In 1809 occurred the Clarke scandal, which caused the duke to resign his office as commander-in-chief. But his services were too valuable to be dispensed with, and in 1811 he returned to his former post. The difficulties he had to contend with lessened as years showed the wisdom of his reforms, and by the time of the battle of Waterloo the British army was an efficient fighting machine, very different from what it had been in 1793. For this alteration the Duke of York deserves the chief credit, as has been said, but he also won a higher fame in the later years of his life as "the soldiers' friend." He was constant in promoting the interests of the private soldiers; and the school at Chelsea Hospital which bears his name is but one of many signs of his care for their welfare. In this latter respect it may well be expected that the new Duke of York will rival his great-great-uncle, but it may be hoped that neither he nor any other English prince will have again to perform the work of reorganizing the British army, which was so efficiently carried out at the commencement of this century by the last Duke of York. From The Spectator. THE ANIMAL VIEW OF MAN. ONE of the most curious and unconsciously paradoxical claims ever advanced for man in his relation to animals, is that by which M. Georges Leroy, philosopher, encyclopædist, and lieutenant des chasses of the Park of Versailles, the vindicator of Buffon and Montesquieu against the criticisms of Voltaire, explains in his "Lettres sur les Animaux "the intellectual debt which the carnivorous animals owe to human persecution. He pictures with wonderful cleverness the development of their powers of forethought, memory, and reasoning which the interference of man, the enemy and "rival," forces upon them, and the consequent intellectual advance which distinguishes the loup jeune et ignorant from the loup adulte et instruit. The philosophic lieutenant des chasses had before long ample opportunities for comparing the affinities "which he had discovered between civilized man and "instructed" wolves, in the experiences of the French Revolution; but without following his fortunes in those troublous times for game-preservers, we may per haps return to the question of the natural relation of animals to man, which, as pictured by Rousseau to prove his a priori notions of a state of nature, so justly incurred the criticism of the practical observer and practised writer, M. Georges Leroy. That man is, generally speaking, from the animal's point of view, an object of regarded the newly discovered creature, fear, hostility, or rapine, is to-day most man, with interest and without fear. Sir unfortunately true. But whether this is Samuel Baker, in his "Wild Beasts and their natural relation, and not one induced, their Ways," remarks on the "curious and and capable perhaps of change, is by no inexplicable fact that certain animals and means certain. Savage man, who has birds exhibit a peculiar shyness of human generally been first in contact with ani- beings, although they are only exposed to mals, is usually a hunter, and therefore an the same conditions as others which are object of dislike to the other hunting ani- more bold." He instances the wildness mals, and of dread to the hunted. But of the curlew and the golden plover, and civilized man, with his supply of bread contrasts it with the tameness of swallows and beef, is not necessarily a hunter; and and wagtails. The reason does not seem it is just conceivable that he might be far to seek. The first are constantly content to leave the animals in a newly sought for food, the latter are left undisdiscovered country unmolested, and con- turbed. Perhaps the best instance of such descend, when not better employed, to a contrast is that of the hawfinch and the watch their attitude towards himself. The crossbill, birds of closely allied form and impossible island in "The Swiss Family appearance. The hawfinch, which is prob. Robinson," in which half the animals of ably the shyest of English small birds, two hemispheres were collected, would be seems to have acquired a deep mistrust an ideal place for such an experiment. of man. But the crossbills on the rare But, unfortunately, uninhabited islands occasions when they descend from the seldom contain more than a few species, uninhabited forests of the north into our and those generally birds, or sea-beasts; Scotch or English woods, are absolutely and in newly discovered game regions, without fear or mistrust of human beings, savage man has generally been before us whom they see very probably for the first with his arrows, spears, and pitfalls. time. When animals do show fear on first Some instances of the first contact of ani- acquaintance, it is probably due, not to mals with man have, however, been pre- any spontaneous dread of man as man, served in the accounts of the early voyages but because they mistake him for somecollected by Hakluyt and others, though thing else. "Nearly all animals," says the hungry navigators were generally Sir Samuel Baker, "have some natural more intent on victualling their ships with enemy which keeps them on the alert, and the unsuspecting beasts and birds, or on makes them suspicious of all strange obnoting those which would be useful com-jects and sounds that might denote the modities for "trafficke," than in cultivating approach of danger;" and it is to this that friendly relations with the animal inhab- he attributes the timidity of many kinds of itants of the newly discovered islands. game in districts where they “have never Thus, we read that near Newfoundland been attacked by firearms." A most curithere are "islands of birds, of a sandy-red, ous instance of this mistaken identity but with the multitudes of birds upon them occurred lately when Kerguelen Island they look white. The birds sit there as was visited by H.M.S. Volage and a thick as stones lie in a paved street. The party of naturalists and astronomers, to greatest of the islands is about a mile in observe the transit of Venus. There were compass. The second is a little less. large colonies of penguins nesting on the The third is a very little one, like a small island, which, though the place is so little rock. At the second of these islands there frequented by man, used at first to run lay on the shore in the sunshine about away up the slopes inland when the sailthirty or forty sea-oxen or morses, which, ors appeared. They apparently took the when our boat came near them, presently men for seals, and thus took what apmade into the sea, and swam after the peared the natural way of escaping from boat." Curiosity, not fear or hospitality, their marine enemies. They soon found was, then, the emotion roused in the sea- out their mistake, for it is said that" when oxen by the first sight of man. The birds, they became accustomed to being chased whales, and walruses in the Wargate Sea by men" - an experience for which the and near Jan Mayen's Land were no less sailors seem to have given them every tame, and the sea-lions in the southern opportunity -"the penguins acquired Pacific, the birds that Barents first dis- the habit of taking to the water at the first turbed in Novaya Zembla, and even the alarm." In another colony, the nesting antelopes which the early explorers en- females would settle down peacefully on countered in the least inhabited parts of their eggs if the visitors stood still. "The central South Africa, seem all to have whole of this community of penguins (they numbered about two thousand) were sub- blade." But the "fellow-creature" is not sequently boiled down into hare-soup' nearly so impracticable as he is supposed for the officers and men of H.M.S. Vo-to be. More human beings are probably lage," writes the Rev. A. E. Eaton, "and killed by tigers than by any other wild very nice they found it." We may com- beast, except by starving wolves. Yet this pare with this destruction of the penguins, is what Sir Samuel Baker has to say on the letter of Hakluyt on the voyage to the subject: "There is a great difference Newfoundland by Antony Parkhurst, de- in the habits of tigers. Some exist upon scribing with high approval the business the game of the jungles. Others prey facilities for the fishing trade offered by especially upon the flocks belonging to the tameness of the great auks, -called the villagers. A few are designated man"penguins "in the passage: "There are eaters.' These are sometimes naturally sea-gulls, musses, ducks, and many other ferocious, and having attacked a human kind of birdes store too long to write being, may have devoured the body, and about, especially at one island named thus acquired a taste for human flesh; or 'Penguin,' where we may drive them on they may have been wounded on more a planke into our ship as many as shall than one occasion, and have learnt to relade her. These birds are also called gard man as a natural enemy. But more penguins, and cannot flie; there is more frequently the man-eater' is a very old meat in one of them than in a goose. The tiger, or more probably tigress, that, havFrenchmen that fish neere the Grand ing hunted in the neighborhood of villages Bank doe bring small store of flesh with and carried off some unfortunate woman, them, but do victuall themselves alwayes has discovered that it is far easier to kill with these birdes." a native than to hunt jungle game." As a rule, the tiger is only anxious to avoid men; and it is noticed that in high grass tigers are more dangerous than in forests, because in the former they cannot be seen, neither can they see, until the stranger is close upon them. An ancient instance of the opposite behavior is that recorded of the new colonists of Samaria, whom the lions attacked, "and slew some of them." A curious inversion of this experience occurred when the islands in the Brahmaputra, which were swarming with tigers, were first cultivated. The natives, mainly by the aid of traps set with a bow and arrow, killed off the tigers so fast that the skins were sold by auction at from eight annas to one rupee apiece. In this case, the tigers were the first aggressors by carrying off cattle. But it seems evident that there exists no a priori reason, founded in natural antipathy, why man and animals, if we could reconstruct a "state of nature" in which we could put civilized, not savage man, should not dwell together in profound peace, or at least in such peace as obtains between accidental neighbors. The only ground for quarrel that seems inevitable is the everlasting one between the shepherd and the wolf; and that, after all, is a question, not of prejudice, but of property. The point of view from which the lion or tiger looks on man, is perhaps not so far removed from that of the non-carnivorous creatures as might be supposed. Man is certainly not the natural food of any animal-except of sharks and alligators, if he is so rash as to go out of his native element into theirs and if the item "man" were subtracted from the bill of fare of all the carnivora, they would never want a meal. The notion of the natural attitude of a lion to a young lady,— When as that tender virgin he did spye, To have at once devoured her tender corse, |