sugar-bowl ; some to devour one another, and some, 

 like our moth, to perish painless in the fire. The super- 

 fcetatioii of insect life, as it seems, must be kept under; 

 indeed, we do not know why insects, except a very few,* 

 were made at all, as to any thing they produce for our ad- 

 vantage ; but the folly of supposing every thing made for 

 us and our advantage ! 



" Has God, thou fool ! work'd solely for thy good, 

 Thy joy, thy paslirae, thy attire, thy food ?" 



The ingenious author (I do not know who he was) of a 

 treatise " sur Cdme des bdtes," after having confuted the 

 Cartesian doctrine of the automatism of the whole animal 

 kingdom, finds less difficulty in bringing into discredit that 

 Aristotelian anomalous " something betwixt soul and 

 body," which was certainly not the brightest excogitation 

 of the great Stageirite. Having expressed as his own 

 immediate and strong conviction that animals have minds, 

 he proceeds to inquire what sort of minds they are, with 

 what felicity or infelicity we shall presently see. <c I re- 

 present to myself," says he, " the mind of beasts, as an 

 immaterial and intelligent something, an active principle 

 possessing sensation, and no more." A parallel being next 

 instituted between our minds and those of beasts, in which 

 he allows to both alike, whatever of good and evil, of pain 

 or pleasure, comes of the possession of ihe sentient princi- 

 ple, he proceeds to allot to man exclusively the faculty of 

 forming those clear and distinct ideas, upon which, by 

 the action of the will, are formed (he says) reflexions, judg- 

 ments, reasonings, frte preferences. Now it is here, and in 

 what follows, where he concedes to animals " little invo- 



1 The bee, the coccineHa, Ihe cos sun, which liie ancieuls ale, the 

 locust, the sil/e-worm, the vesicating /lies (to which we are indebted 

 for the luxury of blisters) and many that cleanse foul fish ponds, 

 partly by feeding the fish, ai\d partly by caling the impurities 



