are overtaken by a storm, birds of the most different species will be brought together by common misfortune.  The birds which are not exactly migratory, but slowly move northwards and southwards with the seasons, also perform these peregrinations in flocks.  So far from migrating isolately, in order to secure for each separate individual the advantages of better food or shelter which are to be found in another district—­they always wait for each other, and gather in flocks, before they move north or south, in accordance with the season.(9)

Going now over to mammals, the first thing which strikes us is the overwhelming numerical predominance of social species over those few carnivores which do not associate.  The plateaus, the Alpine tracts, and the Steppes of the Old and New World are stocked with herds of deer, antelopes, gazelles, fallow deer, buffaloes, wild goats and sheep, all of which are sociable animals.  When the Europeans came to settle in America, they found it so densely peopled with buffaloes, that pioneers had to stop their advance when a column of migrating buffaloes came to cross the route they followed; the march past of the dense column lasting sometimes for two and three days.  And when the Russians took possession of Siberia they found it so densely peopled with deer, antelopes, squirrels, and other sociable animals, that the very conquest of Siberia was nothing but a hunting expedition which lasted for two hundred years; while the grass plains of Eastern Africa are still covered with herds composed of zebra, the hartebeest, and other antelopes.

Not long ago the small streams of Northern America and Northern Siberia were peopled with colonies of beavers, and up to the seventeenth century like colonies swarmed in Northern Russia.  The flat lands of the four great continents are still covered with countless colonies of mice, ground-squirrels, marmots, and other rodents.  In the lower latitudes of Asia and Africa the forests are still the abode of numerous families of elephants, rhinoceroses, and numberless societies of monkeys.  In the far north the reindeer aggregate in numberless herds; while still further north we find the herds of the musk-oxen and numberless bands of polar foxes.  The coasts of the ocean are enlivened by flocks of seals and morses; its waters, by shoals of sociable cetaceans; and even in the depths of the great plateau of Central Asia we find herds of wild horses, wild donkeys, wild camels, and wild sheep.  All these mammals live in societies and nations sometimes numbering hundreds of thousands of individuals, although now, after three centuries of gunpowder civilization, we find but the debris of the immense aggregations of old.  How trifling, in comparison with them, are the numbers of the carnivores!  And how false, therefore, is the view of those who speak of the animal world as if nothing were to be seen in it but lions and hyenas plunging their bleeding teeth into the flesh of their victims!  One might as well imagine that the whole of human life is nothing but a succession of war massacres.