A SIMPLE reading of the history of the earth is sufficient to show that hunting is as old as the hills—not figuratively, but literally; and that the hunter and the hunted, one furnished with weapons of attack, and the other with means of defence, have existed from the earliest periods of creation to the present. That is, the strong have mastered the weak, and in some instances have fallen side by side, as we see by their remains. In the economy of Nature, the process of decay appears to have been the exception, rather than the rule; with beak or tooth, or deadly claw, the strong having struck down the less defended in a never-ending arena. What a hunting field, in one sense, the Old World must have been, when creatures of strange and undefined natures infested the uncertain limits of the elements, and what encounters must have taken place in the ooze and mud periods, when monsters, enormous in stature and stretch of wing, were the implacable hunters of the air, the water, and the slime! Nor can the inhabitants of the earth, the water, and the air, taking the term in its broad rather than in its technical sense, be said to be less hunters now, or less equipped with deadly weapons. Some have supernumerary teeth to supply the loss of such as might get broken in the fray. One strikes down its prey at a blow, another impales its victims on thorns, and a third slays by poison. Some hunt in company, from what would seem to be a very love of sport—as crows and smaller birds give chase to the owl, apparently rejoicing in his embarrassment, at break of day.