INTRODUCTION 



WHEN I first approached the editors of the Spectator for 

 permission to work upon their letters about animals for a 

 book, I realized that I was following a single tradition, 

 but hardly that it was double. The Natural History 

 letters published in the Spectator are the legitimate entail 

 of Gilbert White and Edward Jesse ; they are, like pastoral 

 poetry, a racial inheritance, gathering significance, ex- 

 tending experience, and fostering a knowledge of and 

 sympathy with natural life. They are, in fact, the ex- 

 pression of the normally sensitive English interest in 

 animal life. In many ways, our attitude to animals is 

 still very barbarous and very imperfectly consistent. But 

 it must be remembered that these barbarisms are partly 

 vestigiary relics of an unenlightened past and partly the 

 consequence of the detestable predatory spirit directly en- 

 couraged by commercialism. The spiritual emotion of 

 kinship with animals, again, which may be quite in- 

 dependent of, though no doubt it is partly derived from, 

 the actual scientific proofs of that kinship, is an entirely 

 novel development in human evolution. Such a projection 

 of imaginative sympathy, ultimately embracing all sen- 

 tience, is a valid symptom of civilization, a dynamo of 

 progress, one definite assurance at least that, in spite of all 

 lapses and reversions and stumblings and sinuosities, 

 evolution does mean going on into wider and purer regions 

 of consciousness. But this fine idea is still in its teens, 

 and to expect too much of it is to telescope the present 

 with the future. It will grow, and these humanizing 



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