the matter of carnivorous indulgence, are quite
as much sinned against as sinning.

On the other hand, what Bears prefer to
make their meals upon, before their tastes are
vitiated, is of a truly hermit-like character.
Here is the beau-ideal of a Bear's banquet, as
described by Mr. Lloyd, of Scandinavian fame:
"The Bear feeds on roots, and the leaves and
small limbs of the aspen, mountain-ash, and
other trees; he is also fond of succulent
plants such as angelica and mountain thistle.
To berries he is likewise very partial, and
during the autumn months, when they are
ripe, he devours vast quantities of
cranberries, blueberries, raspberries, strawberries,
cloudberries, and other berries common to
the Scandinavian forests." All this is innocent
enough: we have seen schoolboys suck
angelica when candied, and young ladies eat
"vast quantities" of raspberries and
strawberries, and never thought of accusing them of
excess. What follows, however, is perhaps a
little out of the way, but then, consider the
temptation! "Ripe corn he also eats, and sometimes
commits no small havoc amongst it, for
seating himself, as it is said, on his haunches
in a field of it, he collects with his outstretched
arms nearly a sheaf of it at a time, the ears of
which he then devours." The Bear thus spoken
of is the Brown Bear of Northern Europe; but
all the other members of his family—always
excepting the Grizzly sort—are equally vegetarians.
The Musquaw, or Black Bear of North America,
will restrict himself to a vegetable diet unless
pressed by hunger. A very pardonable exception
is made by him in favour of the little snails
which come up to feed on the sweet prairie
grass, delicious eating, no doubt; as pleasant
as the fawn-coloured snail, that is gathered
in such quantities in the Limousin, and eaten
with so much zest by the Parisians! The
Syrian Bear delights in the chick-pea; the Sun-
Bear of Thibet goes in for mangoes; the Bruang
of Malay, also a Sun-Bear, finds nothing so
delectable as the tender shoots of the cocoa-nut
trees; the Bornean Bruang prefers the ripe
fruit itself, and is able to account for, or give
a good account of, the milk in the cocoa-nut, of
which he is extremely fond; and so on of the
rest, none of them taking to animal food unless
fruit or vegetables be not procurable. But of
all the good things the gods have provided, that
in which the Bear most delights, to him the most
toothsome dainty in existence, is honey. There
is nothing a Bear will not do to get at honey.
What jam is to children, honey is to bears. Given
a tree all but inaccessible, in which the bees have
deposited their saccharine store, and up climbs
the bear in search of the thing he loves. "Few
trees," says Mr. Wood, "afford so unstable a
footing, that the Black Bear will not surmount
them in order to reach a nest of wild bees, and
there are few obstacles which his ready claws
and teeth will not remove in order to enable
him to reach the subjacent dainty. Even if the
honey and comb be deeply concealed in the
hollow of a tree, and the entrances by which the
bees find ingress and egress to and from their
habitation be too small for the insertion of a
paw, the Bear will set steadily to work with his
teeth, and deliberately gnaw his way through
the solid wood until he has made a breach
sufficiently wide to improve his purpose. When
once he has succeeded in bringing the comb to
light, he scrapes them together with his fore
paws and devours comb, honey, and young,
without troubling himself about the stings of
the surviving bees." Pliny asserts that Bears
have a motive for eating honey, besides the
actual pleasure it affords: "Subject they are
many times to dimnesse of sight, for which
cause especially they seek after honeycombs,
that the bees might settle upon them, and with
their stings make them bleed about the head,
and by that means discharge them of the
heavinesse which troubleth their eies." But the
Bear, however pertinacious, does not always
succeed in his quest after honey. Barthélemi
de Glanvil, who compiled a work on natural
history in the fourteenth century, called "La
Propriété des Bestes," in which, he followed, but
not always closely, Aristotle and Pliny, gives
the following amusing account of the way the
Bear hunters of olden time used to bag their
game. It illustrates two points in the Bear's
character: his fondness for honey and his proneness
to anger when he thinks himself injured.
"The Bears," says Glanvil, "climb up trees
where bees have deposited their honey, in
deserts or other places which they frequent,
where they know that honey will be found and
where the bees abide. And when the Bear
scents the honey he makes a hole in the tree
with his claws and gets out the honey and eats
it; and, when the hunter finds that the Bear is
in the habit of coming there, he plants a number
of strong sharp stakes, with the points uppermost,
at the foot of the tree, and fixes a heavy
mallet in the hole, attached by a cord from
above, so that it rises and falls and strikes the
Bear heavy blows on the head, hurting him to
great anger. In his eagerness and ire the
Bear redoubles his efforts to get at the honey,
and, the more he tries, the oftener he is struck
on the head. This strange warfare continues
between the mallet and the Bear, till the beast
becomes weary and dizzy, for his head is but
weak. Through this dizziness he falls from
the tree and drops upon the pointed stakes
which transfix and kill him. And this is the
manner of taking Bears." To be weak in the
head is a recognised failing of the Ursine race.
In Tom Cribb's "Memorial to Congress," where
the Emperor of Russia figures in the fistic duel
with the Prince Regent of England, as "Long
Sandy the Bear," the poet says:

     Georgy tried for his customer's head,
     The part 'boat Long Sandy that's softest 'tis said.

The earliest authority on this point is Pliny,
who tells us that "Beares of all others have the
tenderest scull."

The preceding account may be said to
exhibit the mild, the sweet side of the Bear's
disposition, before he is subjected by man,