78 LAY SERMONS, ESSAYS, AND REVIEWS. [v. 



tween one portion of the sensitive creation and another in these 

 matters. 



Surely then it interests us to know the lot of other animal 

 creatures however far below us, they are still the sole created 

 things which share with us the capability of pleasure and the 

 susceptibility to pain. 



I cannot but think that he who finds a certain proportion of 

 pain and evil inseparably woven up in the life of the very worms, 

 will bear his own share with more courage and submission; and 

 will, at any rate, view with suspicion those weakly amiable 

 theories of the Divine government, which would have us believe 

 pain to be an oversight and a mistake, to be corrected by and 

 by. On the other hand, the predominance of happiness among 

 living things their lavish beauty the secret and wonderful 

 harmony which pervades them all, from the highest to the 

 lowest, are equally striking refutations of that modern Manichean 

 doctrine, which exhibits the world as a slave-mill, worked with 

 many tears, for mere utilitarian ends. 



There is yet another way in which natural history may, I am 

 convinced, take a profound hold upon practical life, and that is, 

 by its influence over our finer feelings, as the greatest of all 

 sources of that pleasure which is derivable from beauty. I do 

 not pretend that natural-history knowledge, as such, can increase 

 our sense of the beautiful in natural objects. I do not suppose 

 that the dead soul of Peter Bell, of whom the great poet of nature 

 says, 



A primrose by the river s brim, 

 A yellow primrose was to him, 

 And it was nothing more, 



would have been a whit roused from its apathy, by the informa 

 tion that the primrose is a Dicotyledonous Exogen, with a mono- 

 petalous corolla and central placentation. But I advocate 

 natural-history knowledge from this point of view, because it 

 would lead us to seek the beauties of natural objects, instead of 

 trusting to chance to force them on our attention. To a person 

 uninstructed in natural history, his country or sea-side stroll is a 



