The chamois is one of those animal species which, before a century, perhaps, will have disappeared; his bones will then figure in the palæontological museums by the side of the skeletons of extinct species. There, too, will be displayed the famous _chamois balls_, each of the size of a nut, covered with a shining substance resembling leather, of an agreeable odour, and seeming to be a morbid dejection, composed of roots and other undigested matter. These balls, the _bezoars_ of the old physicians, were regarded as a remedy against every ill the human flesh is heir to; it was even professed that they rendered soldiers invulnerable, and were a better defence against bullets than the finest armour ever wrought by the smiths of Milan. How precious a remedy for this epoch of civilisation, when man--is he much wiser than his supposed progenitor, the ape?--seeks to replace the cholera and the pestilence by the most terrific engines of destruction! * * * * * The birds inhabiting the inhospitable region of the snows are more numerous than the mammals. Let us briefly refer to a few of the more important. THE EAGLE AND THE WREN. In speaking of the eagle, Tennyson's noble lines to that "imperial bird" will occur to every reader, from the force and clearness of the picture which they present:-- "He clasps the crag with hookèd hands; Close to the sun in lonely lands, Ringed with the azure world, he stands. "The wrinkled sea beneath him crawls; He watches from his mountain walls, And like a thunderbolt he falls." The affection of the eagle for his "mountain walls" may be easily understood. This giant bird, with his carnivorous instincts, is endowed with a remarkable tenacity of life, and can exist in habitats wholly inaccessible to man. But it is strange that a bird, which is as common a type of humility as the eagle is of ambition, and which we almost always cite as a contrast to the eagle--we mean, the delicate little wren--should also be found among the snow and ice, the silence and solitude, of the loftiest mountain regions. To study the flight of the eagle, we should repair to Alpine highlands. When he has reached a certain altitude of the atmosphere, the royal bird descends obliquely, as upon an inclined plane, with a rush and a din of wings, and at a speed of upwards of thirty-six yards per second. We assured ourselves of the accuracy of this fact during an ascent of Mount Hochkœrpf, in the canton of Glaris. The bird traversed in six minutes a space of 40,000 Swiss feet, which is equal to about forty yards per second. This result agrees, on the whole, with the observations of a traveller, who wrote in the _Nouvelle Gazette de Zurich_, on the 26th of August 1863:--