64 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 



11. No objection, I think, now remains against addicting ourselves to 

 entomological pursuits, but that which seems to have the most weight with 

 you, and which indeed is calculated to make the deepest impression upon 

 the best minds — I mean the charge of inhumanity and cruelty. That the 

 science of Entomology cannot be properly cultivated without the death of 

 its objects, and that this is not to be effected without putting them to some 

 pain, must be allowed ; but that this substantiates the charge of cruelty, I 

 altogether deny. Cruelty is an unnecessary infliction of suffering, when 

 a person is fond of torturing or destroying God's creatures from mere wan- 

 tonness, with no useful end in view; or when, if their death be useful and 

 lawful, he has recourse to circuitous modes of killing them, where direct 

 ones would answer equally well. This is cruelty, and this with you I 

 abominate ; but not the infliction of death when a just occasion calls for it. 

 They who see no cruelty in the sports of the field, as they are called, 

 can never, of course, consistently alledge such a charge against the entomo- 

 logist ; the tortures of wounded birds, of fish that swallow the hook and 

 break the line, or of the hunted hare, being, beyond comparison, greater 

 than those of insects destroyed in the usual mode. With respect to utili- 

 ty, the sportsman who, though he adds indeed to the general stock of food, 

 makes amusement his primary object, must surely yield the palm to the 

 Entomologist, who adds to the general stock of mental food, often supplies 

 hints for useful improvements in the arts and sciences, and the objects of 

 whose pursuit, unlike those of the former, are preserved, and may be 

 applied to use for many years. 



But in the view even of those few who think inhumanity chargeable 

 upon the sportsman, it will be easy to place considerations which may 

 rescue the entomologist from such reproof. It is well known that, in pro- 

 portion as we descend in the scale of being, the sensibility of the objects 

 that constitute it diminishes. The tortoise walks about after losing its 

 head ; and the polypus, so far from being injured by the application of the 

 knife, thereby acquires an extension of existence. Insensibility almost 

 equally great may be found in the insect world. This, indeed, might be 

 Inferred a priori; since Providence seems to have been more prodigal of 

 insect life than of that of any other order of creatures, animalcula perhaps 

 alone excepted. No part of the creation is exposed to the attack of so 

 many enemies, or subject to so many disasters ; so that the few individuals 

 of each kind which enrich the valued museum of the entomologist, many 

 of which are dearer to him than gold or gems, are snatched from the 

 ravenous maw of some bird or fish or rapacious insect — would have been 

 driven by the winds into the waters and drowned, or trodden underfoot by 

 man or beast ; for it is not easy, in some parts of the year, to set foot to 

 the ground without crushing these minute animals ; and thus also, instead 

 of being buried in oblivion, they have a kind of immortality conferred 

 upon them. Can it be believed that the beneficent Creator, whose tender 

 mercies are over all his works, would expose these helpless beings to such 

 innumerable enemies and injuries, were they endued with the same sense 

 of pain and irritability of nerve with the higher orders of animals? 



But this inference is reduced to certainty, when we attend to the facts 

 which insects every day present to us, proving that the very converse of 

 our great poet's conclusion, as usually interpreted. 



