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47 
course of nature, dying out, and the production of new ones being 
suspended, that the protoplasm which is the source of life would 
be drained away, and so the man must die. 
I warned you that I might be a little discursive, and there is 
but a slender thread of connection between the subjects on which 
I have treated, and that upon which I am about to speak. I have 
referred to the system of cruelty, in the sense of suffering, which 
pervades the animal world, and from which even the vegetable 
world is not altogether exempt. But it is to be observed that all 
through the domain of nature, until we come up to man himself, 
there is no unnecessary cruelty. Cruelty is the result of weakness, 
and not of strength ; and the more powerful an animal is relatively 
to that on which it preys, the more merciful is its mode of des- 
patching it. The large carnivora, as for instance, the lion, 
frequently despatch their prey with a stroke. I remember hearing 
of a man* who had been struck down by a lion, and who subse- 
quently recovered, and he said that when struck he felt no pain, 
only a sensation of numbness all over his body. But when we 
come to a smaller animal of the same kind, the leopard, which is 
said sometimes to leap from a tree upon such an animal as the 
giraffe, and, sticking its fangs into its neck, to ride it until the 
terrified animal drops from exhaustion and loss of blood, we see 
how much is the increase of suffering from the relative weakness of 
the attack. Or take the weasel, one of the smallest of the 
carnivora. I remember being much struck with a picture by 
Landseer, representing a hare attacked by a weasel, the hare, an 
animal more than twenty times the size of its assailant, standing 
petrified with fear, while the little creature, standing on its hind 
legs, reached up and struck its fangs into its neck. I apprehend 
that that great animal painter must have witnessed the scene which 
he depicted, for I never in my life saw the expression of horror so 
powerfully, so painfully depicted as it was in the eye of that hare. 
There is perhaps no animal whose manner of taking its prey 
is so repulsive as that animal between which and man there is the 
est feeling of abhorrence, and which we have taken as the 
* David Livingstone, 
