and love? The birds seem to pair soon after, and
doubtless the concert of voices has some reference to that event.

There is one other human practice often attributed to the lower
animals that I must briefly consider, and that is the practice, under
certain circumstances, of poisoning their young. One often hears of
caged young birds being fed by their parents for a few days and then
poisoned; or of a mother fox poisoning her captive young when she
finds that she cannot liberate him; and such stories obtain ready
credence with the public, especially with the young. To make these
stories credible, one must suppose a school of pharmacy, too, in the
woods.

"The worst thing about these poisoning stories," writes a friend of
mine, himself a writer of nature-books, "is the implied appreciation
of the full effect and object of poison--the comprehension by the fox,
for instance, that the poisoned meat she may be supposed to find was
placed there for the object of killing herself (or some other fox),
and that she may apply it to another animal for that purpose.
Furthermore, that she understands the nature of death--that it brings
'surcease of sorrow,' and that death is better than captivity for her
young one. How did she acquire all this knowledge? Where was her
experience of its supposed truth obtained? How could she make so fine
and far-seeing a judgment, wholly out of the range of brute affairs,
and so purely philosophical and humanly ethical? It violates every
instinct and canon of natural law, which is for the preservation of
life at all hazards. This is simply the human idea of 'murder.'
Animals kill one another for food, or in rivalry, or in blind ferocity
of predatory disposition; but there is not a particle of evidence that
they 'commit murder' for ulterior ends. It is questionable whether
they comprehend the condition called death, or its nature, in any
proper sense."

On another occasion I laughed at a recent nature writer for his
credulity in half-believing the story told him by a fisherman, that
the fox catches crabs by using his tail as a bait; and yet I read in
Romanes that Olaus, in his account of Norway, says he has seen a fox
do this very thing among the rocks on the sea-coast.[3] One would like
to cross-question Olaus before accepting such a statement. One would
as soon expect a fox to put his brush in the fire as in the water.
When it becomes wet and bedraggled, he is greatly handicapped as to
speed. The