l-frequented Fancy-ball. But is the
statement not borne out by facts? Zoology is on its side--more
especially two of its most interesting branches, Entomology and
Ornithology.

Go to a desert and clap your back against a cliff. Do you think yourself
alone? What a ninny! Your great clumsy splay feet are bruising to death
a batch of beetles. See that spider whom you have widowed, running up
and down your elegant leg, in distraction and despair, bewailing the
loss of a husband who, however savage to the ephemerals, had always
smiled sweetly upon her. Meanwhile your shoulders have crushed a colony
of small red ants settled in a moss city beautifully roofed with
lichens--and that accounts for the sharp tickling behind your ear, which
you keep scratching, no Solomon, in ignorance of the cause of that
effect. Should you sit down--we must beg to draw a veil over your
hurdies, which at the moment extinguish a fearful amount of animal
life--creation may be said to groan under them; and, insect as you are
yourself, you are defrauding millions of insects of their little day.
All the while you are supposing yourself alone! Now, are you not, as we
hinted, a prodigious ninny? But the whole wilderness--as you choose to
call it--is crawling with various life. London with its million and a
half of inhabitants--including of course the suburbs--is, compared with
it, an empty joke. Die--and you will soon be picked to the bones. The
air swarms with sharpers--and an insurrection of radicals will attack
your corpse from the worm-holes of the earth. Corbies, ravens, hawks,
eagles, all the feathered furies of beak and bill, will come flying ere
sunset to anticipate the maggots, and carry your remains--if you will
allow us to call them so--over the whole of Argyllshire in many living
sepulchres. We confess ourselves unable to see the solitude of this--and
begin to agree with Byron, that a man is less crowded at a masquerade.

But the same subject may be illustrated less tragically, and even with
some slight comic effect. A man among mountains is often surrounded on
all sides with mice and moles. What cosy nests do the former construct
at the roots of heather, among tufts of grass in the rushes, and the
moss on the greensward! As for the latter, though you think you know a
mountain from a molehill, you are much mistaken; for what is a mountain,
in many cases, but a collection of molehills--and of fairy
knolls?--which again introduce a new element