266 



IIARDWICKE'S SCIENCE-GOSSIP. 



" Eh dear friends, it's clear that to eat the blood is 

 unlawfu' ! ! it ue'er struck me, this precious passage 

 afore ; eh gude guide us ! ! but there's nae doot 

 aboot it ; eh dear friends, an' me wi sic a relish for 

 black puddins. An' uoo 1 maun e'en forego the 

 carnal indulgence evermair; for it'sjust.for a' the 

 world as unlawfu' to eat black puddins as to com- 

 mit fornication." 



To our own mind the destruction of human beings 

 to satisfy the hunger of the lower animals presents 

 a subject for deep and perhaps painful thought. 

 Pew of the people who live so peacefully in the 

 blessed security of our sea-girt home have the 

 slightest suspicion of the myriads of their fellow- 

 men who are thus slaughtered every year : they read 

 now and then of some poor wretch being carried off 

 by a tiger, taken by a shark, trampled to death by 

 a rogue-elephant, or struck by a cobra, and they 

 think it is very sad, and a sort of accident that 

 happens about once in six months in some places 

 abroad, and they feel very glad, or perhaps even 

 thankful, that there are no such nasty dangerous 

 things in England : Uet them consider the lesson 

 conveyed by the figures of the following brief 

 but pithy extract from the Times of 21th October, 

 1S71 :— 



" The Viceroy has decided to continue and ex- 

 tend the rewards for the destruction of wild beasts 

 and snakes. The following dreadful records of 

 deaths from both causes during the three years end- 

 ing 1869 were published in the Government Gazette 

 last week : — Killed by wild beasts— Madras, 888 ; 

 Bombay (exclusive of Scinde, &c), US ; Bengal, 

 6,711 j North-Western Provinces, 2,168 ; Punjab, 

 310; Oude, 569 ; Central Provinces, 1,317 ; Coorg, 

 147; Hyderabad, 129 ; British Burmah, 107 : total, 

 12,551. Killed by snakes — Madras, 7G0; Bombay 

 (exclusive of Scinde, &c), 5SS ; Bengal, 14,787 ; 

 North-Western Provinces, 2,474; Punjab, 1,064; 

 Oude, 3,782 ; Central Provinces, 1,961 ; Coorg, not 

 given ; Hyderabad, 226 ; British Burmah, 22 : total, 

 25,664." 



The beasts of the field " sent for our use " for- 

 sooth ! why these fearful records might almost lead 

 us to think that we have been sent for theirs. 

 38,218 human beings have been killed outright, 

 12,554 by beasts, and more than twice as many 

 more (25,564) by snakes, within the short space of 

 three years ; and these are but the deaths " officially 

 reported " ; — how many thousands of other deaths 

 have taken place from the same causes, in the dis- 

 tricts from which no returns have been rendered, 

 and how many more in lonely isolated .villages, 

 in dreary swamps and wild jungles, from whence 

 official reports cannot be obtained. Thirty-eight 

 thousand victims make up a tolerable three-seasons' 

 "bag "for a moiety of one single continent; not 

 for all India let it be remembered, but only for the 

 British provinces thereof. Great as our Eastern 



empire seems to be when compared with the 

 scanty area and numerically insignificant population 

 of these little British isles, yet our Indian terri- 

 tories are but a part of India, and India itself 

 covers but a fraction of that area of the earth's 

 surface which swarms with " the great carnivora " 

 and deadly serpents. 



Let some ingenuous youth fresh from his text- 

 books tell us how many times British India will 

 " go "into the 1,309,200 square miles which, ac- 

 cording to the trigonometrical survey, are contained 

 in India proper; then let him try how many times 

 even India proper will go into all the rest of the 

 world from which man-killing beasts and snakes 

 have not yet been eliminated, and however much 

 we may have been startled by the disclosures made 

 by the simple arithmetic of the Government Gazette, 

 yet we shall see that we must multiply its tremen- 

 dous triennial total by at least 7, if we wish to 

 arrive at anything like an approximate estimate of 

 the annual quota of men, women, and children taken 

 all unprepared, and killed and eaten, torn and man- 

 gled, mauled, crushed, and poisoned for this hyper- 

 devilish Todtschlagschmaus* If Moloch reigned, the 

 inexorable requisitions for bloody human sacrifices 

 could scarce be heavier. 



Talk about the horrors of war ! and the widows 

 and orphans of our soldiers slain through the am- 

 bition of Napoleon ! why the sum total of the 

 butcher's-bill for British warriors actually killed 

 in action in all the chief battles of the Peninsular 

 war, including Vimeira, Talavera, Busaco, Barrosa, 

 Badajoz, Salamanca, Vittoria, the Pyrenees, St. 

 Jean de Luz, Nive, Orthes, Tarbes, and Toulouse, 

 with Quatrebras and Waterloo thrown into the 

 bargain, only amounted to 6,000. Talavera is men- 

 tioned as a bloody battle ; it only counts for 800, i.e. 

 for SS fewer than the beasts of Madras have settled 

 with tooth and nail. Waterloo stands good for 93 

 officers and 1,916 men, in all 2,009 ; a roundish num- 

 ber, and one which, according to Byron, so shocked 

 the clerical staff of the Recording Angel, that when 

 they came to it, 



" They threw their pens down in divine disgust, 

 The page was so besmeared with blood and dust," — 



a proceeding which does not appear however to have 

 proved "a caution to snakes" ; for it is shown by 

 the return before us that in the three years to which 

 it refers, they did more cxecutiou amongst British 

 subjects than twelve Waterloos. 



Solferino and Magenta, Konigratz and Sadowa, 

 Gravelotte aud Sedan, sink iuto insignificance ; wc 

 must turn to Wiufield and Canna, or the battles of 

 Israel, if we want to find the actual " killed " on one 

 side at all respectable, when compared with the 

 " casualties " caused by the campaigns of the wild 

 beasts and snakes in the vice-regal domains of 



* Manslayer , s-feast. 



