AJS^NITEESARY ABDEESS. 41 



observation, but they are unanswerable, and their merit is that 

 though they are thiugs -which readily might have happened, so far as 

 my experience goes, I agree with Mat that they never did happen. 



I might cap these truisms by some such as these — their interest 

 also Testing on the fact that the contrary might, very easily, have 

 happened, but has not. I never saw a thrush eat a slug, a swallow 

 catch a butterfly, or a weasel suck a rabbit. Yet general belief 

 would tend to the contrary. Thrushes, feeding as they do on 

 snails, are generally assumed to eat slugs, but they do not ; indeed, 

 with the exception of ducks, and perhaps pheasants, I know of no 

 birds that do. Darwin tells us that the early ancestors of the slug 

 race, finding themselves exposed to dangers they could not run 

 away from, developed for themselves the acrid, slimy juice which 

 coats them, and which renders them so generally disagreeable that 

 birds and beasts alike avoid them. Swallows, having perhaps tried 

 in vain, have, so far as my observation goes, given up trying to 

 catch buttei-flies. The weasel, although his doing so is almost pro- 

 verbial, does not suck a rabbit — he kills him and diinks his blood. 



With reference to animated nature in general, there is an old 

 formula which reads somewhat in this manner. Stones gz-ow ; 

 vegetables grow, and live ; animals grow, and live, and feel ! In 

 the last category insects are included, although, in fact, insect-life 

 seems to me to be far nearer akin to vegetable life. There is not 

 much that insects do that vegetables do not. They seek their 

 sustenance in the same way, through the multitudinous mouths of 

 their fibrous roots ; they are similarly affected by light, air, warmth, 

 and cold ; they turn their leaves and flowers towards the light ; 

 they bend their heads away from the prevailing blast ; they anchor 

 their stems, as it were, against it; they seek and find the most 

 appropriate soil for their sustenance ; and they will wander great 

 distances in pursuit of light. A potato in a dark cellar has been 

 known to send forth a shoot thirty feet and upwards from its root, 

 and eventually find its way to a crevice where light was admitted, 

 and there put forth its leaves. But there is a stronger point of 

 resemblance not generally noticed or perhaps admitted ; that is, 

 their mutual insensibility to pain. I am convinced in my own 

 mind that no insects feel pain, in our sense of the woi'd. Why 

 should they do so ? Pain is absolutely necessary to the preserva- 

 tion and continuance of the life of the higher animals. Were it 

 not for pain, a hungry dog would eat his own leg ; a child, instead 

 of sucking his thumb, would bite it off ; but to insects pain would 

 be superfluous and unnecessary. To my mind it would be to doubt 

 the beneficence of the Creator to assume that they were endowed 



