334 SCIENTIFIC ILLUSTRATIONS [Sta 



those officials who do not believe in the sanctity of human life, 

 but consider it to be of the same value as that of the brute or 

 insect, may pause and consider a little before they punish men 

 and women for committing acts like those of the wasp, and 

 which are prompted by the same instinct. Moreover, all 

 magistrates, whatever their creed, should remember that there 

 are ignorant unsophisticated men in the world whose actions 

 are prompted only by natural instinct, and who have never 

 been instructed by conventional opinion. If such men are 

 brought before a court of justice, they are entitled to be consi- 

 dered with something of the leniency which we feel towards 

 the wasp. If in theological ignorance they followed their only 

 guide, their instinct, that fact should be weighed when punish- 

 ment is being meted out to them. It requires more than natural 

 instinct to prompt man to comprehend the moral duty of 

 watching the starvation of his offspring when there is at hand 

 a short cut to its extinction. H. 



Statesmanlike Insensibility. 



It is very remarkable that some fishes can subsist, apparently 

 in health, in water sufficiently heated to boil them if dead. 

 Broussonet found, by experiments, that several species of fresh- 

 water fishes lived many days in water so hot that the human 

 hand could not be held in it for a single minute. Saussure 

 found living eels in the hot springs of Aix, in Savoy, in which 

 the temperature is pretty regularly 113 of Fahrenheit. But 

 still more extraordinary are the facts recorded by Humboldt 

 and Boupland, who saw living fishes, apparently in health and 

 vigour, thrown up from the crater of a volcano in South 

 America, with water and hot vapour that raised the thermometer 

 to 210 Fahrenheit, a heat less by only two degrees than that 

 of boiling water. The equanimity with which these slippery 

 creatures bear "getting into hot water," reminds us of the 

 statesman's insensibility to the heated turmoil of public indig- 

 nation. We have seen many glib specimens, hurled forth from 

 their places by explosions of righteous opinion, float about quite 

 comfortably in currents of popular fury which we should have 

 thought would annihilate them. They disregarded the irony 



