Many birds forsake their progeny at the least break in the usual course of things. Unaccountable panic seizes them, abruptly quenching the overmastering love that before had governed the activities of the pair. If you merely touch a young pigeon, the parents will from that moment onward hear his clamour for food with indifference--they will let him starve, while the drama of rearing new young dimly takes shape in their mysterious minds. Other more courageous birds will fight to the end without yielding, they will fly into snares in the attempt to reach their brood, they will come daily to feed their young in the cage, and if a strange egg has been introduced into their nest, whether by the hand of man or the cunning of the cuckoo, they will make no difference between the bastard and their legitimate offspring. I have witnessed some fierce battles, notably that of a pair of warblers against a magpie, who, undeterred by the stones I was throwing, managed in less than five minutes to remove from their nest into her own, as a treat for her young magpies, all the little warblers just full-fed with succulent insects. Whither turn for help against the rivalry of appetites organized by Providence? "The reason of the strongest is always the best," sadly observes the poet philosopher. A sorrowful avowal, that, which leaves us, for sole comfort, the hypothetical felicity of another world. But what could be more unjust than to exclude from a celestial paradise these secondary creatures, victims of our common fate, who in the beginning possessed the earthly paradise, and were driven from it in the company of our erring ancestors, without having followed their sinful example? Until the order of things changes, all that the weak can do is to cry out their protest, their vain appeal to universal justice, which, deaf, insensible, and paralyzed, sits in mute contemplation of the disorder composing the order of the world. Man, the supreme arbiter of the destinies of his inferiors, has arrogated all rights. The child who lets a bird flutter at the end of a string only to jerk it to the ground when the poor creature finally thought itself free, lives in his own person the evolution from the frank cruelty of the savage to the decent hypocrisies of civilized barbarism. Man is, indeed, the first one whom animals learn to guard against. Wherever there are no men, or few, birds are among the first to become fearless. I have seen nests built in wide recesses and fully exposed to view, amid the desert ruins of the citadel of Corinth.