history of a beaver would be considered as a fable. The faculties and talents of animals, therefore, instead of increasing are constantly diminishing, for time may be said to oppose them. The more the human species are multiplied and improved the more they become subjected to the dominion of an absolute tyrant, who will hardly permit their individual existence, deprives them of liberty, of every avenue to society, and destroys the very root of their intelligence. What they are become, or what they may become, is an inadequate indication of what they have been or might be. Who can say, if the human species were annihilated, to which of the animals would the sceptre of the earth belong? THE STAG, OR RED DEER.[C] [C] The stag in Greek [Greek: elaphos]; in Latin _cervus_, in Italian _cervo_; in Spanish _ciervo_; in Portuguese _veado_; in German _hirsch_; in Danish _hiort_; in Swedish _kronhjort_; in Dutch _hert_; in Polish _jelenie_. The Stag is one of those mild, peaceable, and innocent animals, which seem created to adorn and animate the solitudes of the forest, and to occupy, remote from man, the peaceful retreats of Nature. His light and elegant form, his flexible yet nervous limbs, his grandeur, strength, and swiftness, his head, rather adorned than armed with living branches, which, like the leaves of a tree, are every year renewed, sufficiently distinguish him from the other inhabitants of the forest. As he is the noblest among these, he has been made subservient to the pleasures, and employed the leisure of the greatest heroes. The exercise of the chace may well succeed, or should rather precede the fatigues of war. To be acquainted with the management of horses and arms are talents equally common to the warrior and the hunter. A familiarity with address, bodily exercise and fatigue, so necessary to support courage, are found in the chace, and carried into the field of battle. Hunting is an agreeable school of a necessary art; the only amusement which entirely detaches diversion from business; the only recreation that is totally unaccompanied with effeminacy, and always produces a lively pleasure, that never satiates or cloys. In what manner can those men be better employed who, from their situations, are constantly fatigued with company, than in hunting? Continually, as it were, beset with a multitude, exposed to the importunity of their demands, forced to attend to the affairs of others, to embark in matters of the greatest concern, and, in effect, to be the more constrained in proportion to the elevation of their stations; great men would only feel the irksome weight of grandeur, and exist only for others, if they did not occasionally abstract themselves from a crowd of attendant flatterers. To enjoy themselves in real social affections, to preserve private friendships, to nourish sentiments a thousand times more precious than all the ideas of grandeur, they have need of