Our forefathers, quite justly, believed that, to a very great extent, the animals feel and love, even as we do. Certain it is that they have a singular and very decided taste for music. The very Shad, simple as they seem, will follow you to the sound of bells; Valence tells us; and Noël tells us that he has often seen the poor Whale, the Joubarde roll and frolic around the bark, delighted with the music, and, fearless of the _man_! What the poor, dumb creatures most enjoy; what they most possess of intelligent life; what they have most been deprived of by dint of human and very cruel persecution;--is the right, the security, the sanctity of marriage! Fugitive and isolated, they now only retain that which we, most cruelly, have left to them; temporary concubinage, that miserable temporary concubinage which makes sterile every creature that is subjected to it. Marriage, fixed, settled, faithful, is the very life of nature,--and we find it in even the poorest living tribes on which man's tyranny has not yet imposed unnatural laws. The Roebuck, the Pigeon, that prettiest of the Parrot family, the "Love Bird," and hundreds of other species, which we, in our profound ignorance and fancied learning, despise, have this instinctive love of marriage. You may notice that, even among the other and wilder birds and beasts, the matrimonial tie is inseparable, at least, until the young family is old enough to take care of itself. The Hare, in its timid and ever anxious life, the Bat, that strange prowler in the dark night hours, are very very tender of their families. The Crustaceæ, even, nay, even the very Poulpes have their marital affection; take the female and the male is sure to be there, to combat vainly, and to be taken with her. How much more, then, shall Love, the Family, _Marriage_, in the true sense of that word, exist among our gentle, truly gentle, till brutally persecuted, amphibious creatures! Slow, sedentary, attached to home, how natural, how inevitable it is, that, the male should be true to his mate,--and she to him! Among them the husband will die for, or with, the wife, either for the young one. And, among them, too, we find what we too often, only in vain look for among what we presumptuously term the higher animals, the young one will boldly leave its shelter and fight for the mother that has previously rescued him. Steller and Hartwig mention a strange, an almost human scene enacted in the family of the Otarie, another amphibious creature. The female had allowed her young to be stolen from her. The male, furious, beat her severely, and she grovelled and wept.