an experiment: we should turn these, if at home, to the uses of agriculture and many other purposes; and earthquakes also may be a blessing, under Providence, when human art shall take the place of human ignorance. We continue to use the ocean for a highway, albeit amidst shaking mountains of water, and we shall not abandon the shaking land when we have adapted our dwellings to its new circumstances, if such new circumstances are to be, as the whirligig of time turns round.
WOLF LORE.
It is curious how few subjects can be chosen which will not afford a fund of amusing legends and strange learning to those who take the trouble to search in old books. Let us take, for example, such an unpromising creature as the wolf, and trace out a few of his associations; premising that tales and incidents connected with wolves are so abundant, we shall only extract a few as samples. Everyone is familiar with the wolf from zoological gardens and menageries, and knows that he is much like a large shepherd-dog; from which he is, however, scientifically marked off by the fact of his tail being straight, whereas it is curved in the canine families. They are almost universally distributed through the temperate regions (where they have not been exterminated), shading off into jackals, hyenas, &c., towards the tropics, and giving way to their warmer-clad brethren, the foxes, in the Arctic regions. As their bones have been found in the great fossil cave of Aurignac in France, they can assert a high antiquity; for the relics of seventeen human skeletons were also found there, which are the oldest specimens of humanity known to geologists. With their regal memories of rearing the founders of Rome, it is humiliating to be obliged to confess that, like Eastern ghouls, they condescend to tear up and devour the dead, when hard pressed by hunger. There are even stories extant of their eating earth when in such straits, but their friends explain away this unpleasant fact by cleverly turning it into a virtue. They wisely lay up food in times of abundance, it is said, and then dig it up when starving; and hence the calumny has sprung.
In English poetry wolves serve as examples of cunning and ferocity. One modern poet makes Iphigenia, just before her sacrifice by the Grecian chiefs, say:
The stern, blaDimly I could descry
The stern, black-bearded kings, with wolfish eyes,
The steWaiting to see me die.
They are more important in the domain of fable. We all remember how wisely one discourses of the joys of perfect liberty to the pampered house-dog, whose neck is yet somewhat grazed by the chain; and how another picked a quarrel with the lamb, and reproached the crane for asking payment for its surgical assistance when it had had the good fortune to escape from his very jaws. Their character is here looked at in its shrewd worldly-wise aspect: something like Ulysses himself, they have seen much and learnt much, and are always equal to the occasion. They do not fare quite so well perhaps in popular estimation, if we judge from proverbs. “Talk of a wolf and you will see him,” was the Roman proverb we translate “Talk of the devil, &c,” or, as the present more delicate century paraphrases it, “Speak of the angels, and you may hear the rustling of their wings.” The same people expressively spoke of “having a wolf by the ears,” to signify that they were in great straits and could neither advance nor retire. Similarly, to “be between the dog and the wolf,” was to be between two fires, to interfere between husband and wife; and “to take a lamb from the wolf,” was to snatch meat from a dog’s mouth. Dean Trench justly stigmatises “One must howl with the wolves,” as being the most dastardly of all proverbs. You must join in running down, that is, every object of popular detestation, lest you should be supposed guilty of sympathising with it. The Greeks with their lively fancy took a humorous view of the animal, speaking of “a wolf’s wings,” as we do of pigeon’s milk or pig’s wool.
As for wolves in England, everyone knows from his school-books in whose reign they were exterminated by making taxes payable in their heads. Quite recently, however, a few have been killed at different places in England, the theory for their discovery being that when fox-cubs are imported (as often happens) from France, one or two wolf-cubs have come accidentally amongst them. As late as Queen Elizabeth’s reign they are said to have been seen in Dean Forest and Dartmoor, and in 1281 a commission was appointed to destroy wolves in the midland counties. We may gather the rigour with which wolves used to be hunted down in earlier times from a collection of Edward the Confessor’s Laws, ratified by the Conqueror. If anyone violently infringe the Church’s protection, it is there laid down, on contempt of its sentence, he is to be outlawed by the king, and then, “from the day of the outlawry his head is a wolf’s head.” In Ireland wolves used to swarm, and the Irish wolf-dog is a breed as distinct and as celebrated as the Scottish deer-hound. In this latter country the last two wolves were killed between 1690 and 1700. An amusing writer, who travelled through Sutherlandshire about 1650, says of it, after enumerating divers animals, “specially here never lack wolves more than are expedient.” Even now, in a severe winter, wolves leave the forests and press up to the very outskirts of a place no further from us than Rouen, attacking the sheep and alarming the inhabitants.
But it is in superstition and magical ceremonies that the wolf’s fame stands highest. All the ancient nations associated it with the world of darkness. It is represented on the painted walls of the Egyptian catacombs and temples, and is probably connected there with some esoteric doctrine of the transmigration of souls. In all the descriptions of Roman magical practices which have come down to us, the commonest feats ascribed to Mœris or Canidia (those wizards of world-wide renown), are to draw the moon down from the sky, and to become wolves at pleasure and hide themselves in the woods. If the unfortunate wryneck was the bird sacred to the softer impulses of love, and when bound to a wheel and slowly turned round was believed to bring a