46 HAMPSHIRE DAYS 



motionless, looking the other way ; I sit down to 

 think; I lie flat on my back with hands clasped 

 behind my head, and gaze at the sky, and still the 

 trouble goes on he will not believe in me, nor tolerate 

 me. There is nothing to do but get up and go away 

 out of sight and sound of the peewits. 



It appears to me that this sympathy for the lower 

 animals is very much a matter of association an over- 

 flow of that regard for the rights of and compassion 

 for others of our kind which are at the foundations 

 of the social instinct. The bird is a red- and a warm- 

 blooded being we have seen that its blood is red, and 

 when we take a living bird hi our hands we feel its 

 warmth and the throbbing of its breast : therefore 

 birds are related to us, and with that red human 

 blood they have human passions. Witness the peewit 

 the mother bird, when you have discovered or have 

 come near her downy little one could any human 

 mother, torn with the fear of losing her babe, show 

 her unquiet and disturbed state in a plainer, more 

 understandable way! But in the case of creatures 

 of another division in the kingdom of life non- 

 vertebrates, without sensible heat, and with a thin 

 colourless fluid instead of red blood, as if like plants 

 they had only a vegetative life this sympathy is not 

 felt as a rule. When, in some exceptional case, 

 the feeling is there, it is because some human associa- 

 tion has come into the mind in spite of the differences 

 between insect and man. 



