Read, for instance, the magnificent account of the great hunting matches of the Tartar princes. "A circle is drawn of many miles in circumference, to encompass the game of an extensive district; and the troops that form the circle regularly advance towards a common centre, where the animals, surrounded on every side, are abandoned to the darts of the hunters." Both the Red Indians of the Prairie and the savages of the Pampas used to surround and destroy the game in exactly the same way. The unfortunate Chinese princess given over for political advantages to a prince of the Huns, "laments that she had been condemned by her parents to a distant exile, under a barbarian husband, and complains that sour milk was her only drink, raw flesh her only food, a tent her only palace." This describes exactly the ordinary life and home of the Huns. "The Scythians of every age have been celebrated as bold and skilful riders; and constant practice had seated them so firmly on horseback, that they were supposed by strangers to perform the ordinary duties of civil life--to eat, to drink, and even to sleep--without dismounting from their steeds." Red Indians of Pampas and Prairie, cowboy and gaucho, lived exactly in the same way. In those pages of Gibbon which treat of the Huns, Scythians, and other hordes, one recognizes sometimes the wagon of the Boers; sometimes a migration of the East African Masai; then perhaps it is a weapon that is really the lasso, or a disposition and character exactly paralleled by the Crows and Blackfeet. Even the great grass plains of Australia, where the kangaroo, the wallaby, and the dingo have been replaced by the sheep and the "Waler" horse, one finds, in the shepherd and squatter, traits that remind one of the gaucho or the cowboy. Nor is this in the least extraordinary, for when a scanty rainfall produces those great limitless rolling seas of grass, Nature provides first large herbivorous animals to eat it down as well as carnivorous beasts to keep their numbers in control, until such time as a race of horsemen appears, whose domestic cattle replace the bisons, guanacos, kangaroos, and antelopes, and so assist in replenishing and subduing the earth. CHAPTER XVIII POISONS Poisoned arrows--Fish poisons--Manchineel--Curare--A wonderful story--Antiaris--Ordeals--The Obi poison--Oracles produced by poisons--Plants which make horses crazy and others that remove their hair--Australian sheep and the Caustic Creeper--Swelled head--Madness by the Darling Pea--Wild and tame animals, how they know poisons--How do they tell one another?--The Yew tree, when is it, and when is it not poisonous? Even to-day all embryo chemists and doctors are required to "pass" in the recognition of the more important medicinal plants.