BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 21 



and decay. The carnivorous animals confessedly live by mu- 

 tual destruction. How ridiculous is the effort to institute a 

 scale of sympathy, at the head of which the red-blooded ani- 

 mals are to be placed as more nearly appealing to our mercy. 

 They are, to be sure, nearest in fact, for the reason that we 

 too are red-blooded animals. 



What right have we to suppose that the animalcule or a 

 caterpillar does not experience the same pangs from sudden 

 dissolution, that are felt by ourselves, or a stag or a boar ? 

 What difference, in this respect, does it make whether the 

 blood of the slain creature be red, green or white ? Is not 

 every vegetable devoured, even by your Gfrahamite, a micro- 

 cosm of the world, and like it populous with living things ? 

 If then the destruction of animal life be a crime, does He 

 who marks the fall of every sparrow, regard with less com- 

 placency this wholesale annihilation of a little world, with all 

 its joys and passions, by the remorseless jaws of that soft- 

 hearted vegetable eater ? Four-fifths of the creatures which 

 are visible to the naked eye live in our sight upon mutual 

 destruction while the remaining fifth live by the destruction 

 of those creatures of the existence of which the microscope 

 has taught us ! Where will our sickly benevolence stop ? All 

 things that live in the grades below man are the fungi of decay, 

 and all that is material of him is alike so ! Death is indeed 

 so entirely the law of life, that though fed on air you must 

 do murder with every breath ; it is the fuel of all life, except, 

 perhaps, that of baby ethics, alias, transcendentalism ! 



Why, then, give to the red-blooded animals so dispropor- 

 tionate an amount of sympathy ? The monadic, vegetable 

 and insect lives, are as necessary to the economy of God's 

 World, as he has been pleased to institute it, as our own, or 

 the lives of any other of the higher animals. 



Indeed, it is a curious fact, entirely left out of view in 

 modern theories, that even the lustful battles of the animal 

 tribes among themselves, are necessary to their own integrity 



