DEATH.
[DEATH.
BIRDS OF PREY.—(THE RAPTORES). ]
It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature a refuge from the thoughts of the age, I for the first time encountered the head of the viper. This occurred in a valuable museum of anatomical imitations. The head, marvellously imitated and enormously enlarged, so as to remind one of the tiger's and the jaguar's, exposed in its horrible form a something still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate, infinite, fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine is so potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged teeth; not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir of poison which slays immediately; but their extreme fineness, which renders them liable to fracture, is compensated by an advantage that perhaps no other animal possesses; namely, a magazine of supernumerary teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally broken. Oh, what provision for killing! What precautions that the victim shall not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I stood by it scandalized, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. Nature, the great mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked me with a maternity so cruelly impartial.
Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a darker shadow than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in winter. I had come forth like a child; I returned home like an orphan, feeling the notion of a Providence dying away within me.
Our impressions are not less painful when we see in our galleries the endless series of birds of prey, prowlers by day and night, frightful masks of birds, phantoms which terrify the day itself. One is powerfully affected by observing their cruel weapons; I do not refer to those terrible beaks which kill with a blow, but those talons, those sharpened saws, those instruments of torture which fix the shuddering prey, protract the last keen pangs and the agony of suffering.