ON THE SUPPOSED 



SENSIBILITY AND INTELLIGENCE OF INSECTS, 



WE may not positively have impaled a worm ; we are 

 not perhaps initiated in the so accounted cruel mysteries 

 of hook and line ; but few of us would not rather have 

 trodden elsewhere, when we have chanced to crush the 

 worm that was crawling across our path, nor is it with 

 entire indifference that we see him cut in twain by spade, 

 or ploughshare, and writhing (as we call it) at both ends 

 on the up-turned earth. Then, as to the beetle, with his 

 horny covering, the crash of whose extinction unavoidably 

 calls attention to it, the authority of Shakspeare, as 

 to the kind, and amount of his suffering, has made it 

 sacrilege to doubt its reality ! We were, however, not ill- 

 pleased when the thought lately occurred to us, that crea- 

 tures whom in our inadvertence we so incessantly injure 

 or destroy, might be, after all, in much probability, so 

 constituted by benevolent Nature, as to be exempted, if 

 not absolutely, in a great measure, from those painful 

 consequences which wound or contusion inflict upon our- 

 selves. I am sufficiently aware how serious a charge I 

 incur of departure from received opinions, in the pages 

 which are to follow. I know that the humane prejudice 

 of ages is all against me ; Lactantius has assured me that 



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