When a possible victim ventured from its shelter it was at once hunted, driven back, or captured. Our forests and woodlands, now reduced to a minimum, must have been similarly crowded with timorous creatures; the open country was free to the larger and more powerful forms. Man has altered all this, man with his axe and hoe has let light into the jungle. What says Stevenson, the roadmaker?
"'Mid vegetable king and priest
And stripling, I (the only beast)
Was at the heart's work, killing; hewed
The stubborn roots across, bestrewed
The glebe with the dislustered leaves,
And bade the saplings fall in sheaves;
Bursting across the tangled math
A ruin that I called a path,
A Golgotha that, later on,
When rains had watered, and sun shone,
And seeds enriched the place, should bear
And be called garden."
When others, long before Stevenson, hacked their way through the primeval forest, "bathed in vegetable blood," they let in the predatory beasts and increased the struggle. But man, too, is predatory, and from craving for food or desire for sport he helped the lesser folk at the expense of the greater, especially when he realised that these powerful creatures competed with him in blood lust. How well he succeeded in driving them from the face of the earth may be realised by the study of history. Here in Britain the white-tailed eagle and the osprey have gone, the golden eagle survives because it is useful as a protector of other game or rather as an assistant on the deer forest; the kite, once a useful and very familiar scavenger in our medieval towns, and the harriers are reduced to a few strugglers, solely maintained by private protectors;
