TEACHING CHILDREN TO BE HUMANE. 13? 



year by year they grow up with kindly feelings 

 towards them, I think they will hardly be amongst 

 those who would destroy perhaps fifty lovely 

 butterflies in order to complete a circle of colour 

 in some case of insects. That is the kind of 

 collecting I wholly condemn as both useless and 

 cruel. So much study can be carried on without 

 taking life, that it seems undesirable to adopt in 

 early life any line of investigation which involves 

 the death of the objects being studied at any 

 rate until the student is old enough to avoid any 

 possible cruelty in the matter. It appears to me 

 that if we bring up young people with a reverent 

 loye for all, even the lowliest of God's handiwork, 

 that feeling will tend to restrain them from exer- 

 cising the instinct of destruction which we may 

 often trace in children's early years. 



There must be a certain amount of slaying for 

 necessary food, and animals and birds prey upon 

 each other by the very laws of their existence. 

 Specimens, too, are required for museums, else 

 how could students learn to know the various 

 orders of animal and bird creation ; but outside all 

 these unavoidable uses, the indiscriminate slaughter 



