sive to him and peaceable with each other; yet it
seems not to have made any impression on the hardened spectators."

Think of a troop of angels fly-catching, snail-seeking, and bug-hunting
through all lands, lugging through the air, horses, giraffes, elephants,
and rhinoceroses, and dropping them at the door of the ark. One has
crossed the Atlantic with rattlesnakes, copperheads, and boas twined
around him, almost crippling his wings with their snaky folds; and
another with a brace of skunks, one under each wing, that the renewed
world may not lack the fragrance of the old. What a subject for the
pencil of a Raphael or Dore! Had the "hardened spectators" beheld such a
scene as this, Noah and his cargo would have been cast out of the ark,
and the sinners themselves, converted by this stupendous miracle, would
have taken passage therein.

Not only must there have been a succession of most stupendous miracles
to get the animals to the ark, but also to return them to their proper
places of abode. But few of them could have lived in the neighborhood of
Ararat, had they been left there. How could the polar bear return to his
home among the ice-bergs, the sloths to the congenial forests of the New
World, and all the mammals, reptiles, insects, and snails to their
respective habitats, the homes of their ancestors for ages innumerable?
To return them was just as necessary as to obtain them, and, though less
difficult, was equally impossible.

_How could eight persons, all that were saved in the ark, attend to all
these animals!_ Nearly all would require food and water once a day, and
many twice. In a menagerie, one man takes care of four cages,--feeds,
cleans, and waters the animals. In the ark, each person, women included,
must have attended each day to ten thousand nine hundred and sixty-four
birds, seven hundred and sixty-six beasts, one hundred and fourteen
reptiles, one thousand one hundred and fifty land-snails, and one
hundred and eighty-seven thousand five hundred insects.

Few persons have an idea of the difficulty of keeping even the common
birds of a temperate climate alive in confinement for any length of
time. Food that is quite suitable in a wild state may be fatal to them
when they are kept in the house. Linnets feed on winter rape-seed in the
wild state, but soon die if fed upon it in-doors. "They are to be fed,"
says Bechstein, "on summer rape-seed, moistened in water; and their food
must be varied by the ad