"The earth was our empire, the realm of the aquatic birds in the Transitional age when, young and fresh, she emerged from the waters. An era of strife, of battle, but of abundant subsistence. Not a heron then but earned his life. There was need neither to attack nor pursue; the prey hunted the hunter; it whistled, or it croaked on every side. Millions of creatures of undefined natures, bird-frogs, winged fish, infested the uncertain limits of the two elements. What would ye have done, ye feeble mortals, the latest-born of the world? The Bird prepared earth for ye. Colossal encounters were waged against the enormous monster-births of the ooze; the son of air, the bird, attaining the dimensions of an Anak, shrunk not from battle with the giant. If your ungrateful histories have not traced these events, God's grand record narrates them in the depths of the earth, where she deposits the conquered and the conquerors, the monsters exterminated by us, and we who have exterminated them.
"Your lying myths make us contemporaries of a human Hercules. What had his club availed against the plesiosaurus? Who would have met, face to face, the horrible leviathan? The capacity of flight was absolutely needed, the strong intrepid wing which from the loftiest height bore downwards the Herculean bird, the epiornis, an eagle twenty feet in stature, and fifty feet from wing-tip to wing-tip, the implacable hunter, who, lord of three elements, in the air, in the water, and in the deep slime, pursued the dragon with ceaseless hostility.
"Man had perished a hundred times. Through our agency man became possible on a pacified earth. But who will be astonished that these awful wars, which lasted for myriads of years, spent the conquerors, wearied the winged Hercules, transformed him into a feeble Perseus, a pale and lustreless memory of our heroic times?
"Lowered in strength and stature, but not in heart, famished by our very victory, by the disappearance of evil races, by the division of the elements which held our prey concealed at the bottom of the waters, we in our turn were hunted upon the earth, in the forests and the marsh, by those new-comers who, without our help, had never been. The malice and dexterity of the woodman were fatal to our nests. Like a coward, in the thick of the branches which impede flight and shackle combat, he laid his hand on our young ones. A new war, and a less fortunate one, this, which Homer calls the War of the Pigmies and the Cranes. The lofty intelligence of the cranes, their truly military tactics, have not prevented man their enemy from gaining the advantage by a thousand execrable arts. Time was on his side, and earth, and nature: she moves forward, drying up the earth, exhausting the marshes, narrowing the undefined region where we reigned. It will be with us, in the end, as with the beaver. Many species perish: another century, perhaps, and the heron will have lived."
The story is too true. Except those species which have taken their side, have abandoned earth, have given themselves up frankly and unreservedly to the liquid element; except the divers, the cormorant, the wise pelican, and a few others, the aquatic tribes seem in a state of decay. Restlessness and sobriety maintain them still. It is this persistent anxiety which has gifted the pelican with a peculiar organ, hollowing for her under her distended beak a movable reservoir, a living sign of economy and of attentive foresight.
Others, skilful voyagers, like the swan, live by constantly changing their abode. But the swan herself, which, though uneatable, is trained by man on account of her beauty and her grace—the swan, formerly so common in Italy, and to which Virgil so constantly refers, is now very rare there. In vain the traveller would seek for those snow-white flotillas which covered with their sails the waters of the Mincio, the marshes of Mantua; which mourned for Phaëton in despite of his sisters, or in their sublime flight, pursuing the stars with harmonious song, repeated to them the name of Varus.[20]
That song, of which all antiquity speaks, is it a fable? These organs of singing, which are so largely developed in the swan, were they always useless? Did they never disport themselves in happy freedom when enjoying a more genial atmosphere, and spending the greater portion of the year in the mild climates of Greece and Italy? One might be tempted to believe it. The swan, driven back to the north, where his amours secure mystery and repose, has sacrificed his song, has gained the accent of barbarism, or become voiceless. The muse is dead; the bird has survived.
Gregarious, disciplined, full of tactic and resources, the crane, the superior type of intelligence among these species, might contrive, one would fancy, to prosper, and to maintain herself everywhere in her ancient royalty. She has lost two kingdoms, however: France, where she now only appears as a bird of passage; England, where she rarely ventures to deposit her eggs.
