Page:The Common Birds of Bombay.djvu/135

Rh again. Zoologically considered, the Crow is merely a bird of the corvine family, which is found abundantly throughout the peninsula of India, and is, as the phrase goes, "too well known to require description." But then its chief point is that you cannot consider it zoologically, except, indeed, as you may consider man zoologically, There are said to be men of science in Germany who have succeeded in purging their minds completely from all taint of sentiment and unreason, and can think of man with scientific precision as one of the many species of the mamalian order Quadrumana. But to most of us this is impossible. We think habitually of man and animal as contrasted, and the Crow takes its place in our minds with man, not, indeed, as a kind of man, but as an appendage to him, one of the conditions of his life, an element of his social system. This is the peculiarity of the Crow. It has separated itself from the category of birds which live in the fields and woods and belong to nature. It lives in towns and belongs to man in the sense in which we contrast man and nature. Like the Mahar outside an Indian village, whose perquisite is the hides of all the cattle that die in the village, the Crow lives outside the bungalow and claims the refuse of all food eaten within it. But if you do not provide a reasonable amount of refuse, the Crows will come inside and help themselves, as the Mahars will poison cattle if enough do not die of themselves; for there is no right to which the Crows cling more tenaciously than the right to be fed by the man whose compound they clean. Sometimes Crows feed on fruits, or hunt for worms in ploughed fields, or gather to catch the winged white-ants which issue from the