235 



volcanoes give him ample warning ; tliat their periods of 

 activity are often interrupted by very long intervals of repose ; 

 and that the extreme fertility of the soil formed by volcanic 

 dust has^ as an attraction, always induced a dense population 

 voluntarily to brave the dangers of an occasional outbreak. 



7. Carnivorous Animals. — Let us now consider the case of 

 carnivorous animals alleged to be inconsistent with the Divine 

 Benevolence. A great deal of sickly sentimentalism has been 

 expended upon this subject by writers very imperfectly ac- 

 quainted with the facts. Disgusting pictures have been drawn 

 of the " carnage " of Nature. Mill, with the passionate bitter- 

 ness which he showed in his attacks upon Natural Religion, 

 speaks of " the lower animals (meaning, apparently, all except 

 man) as divided, with scarcely an exception, into devourers 

 and devoured.'' Now this is not the case. The vast majority 

 of land-animals are vegetable -feeders. So probably are those 

 which people fresh water, if we may draw inferences from the 

 universal presence of a rich sub-aqueous vegetation. The sea, 

 it is true, offers a difl&culty, because of the difficulty of observa- 

 tion ; but the analogy of Nature would lead us to believe that 

 there, too, the vegetable-feeders are the most numerous. Of 

 the immense number of molluscs, insects, as well as of mammals 

 and birds tbat consume a vegetable diet, only a small propor- 

 tion, probably, have their simple existence of animal enjoy- 

 ment cut short by their carnivorous foes. How monstrous the 

 assertion of Mill is will also appear from familiar instances of 

 great aggregations of animals in free nature. Who has not 

 heard of the immense herds of bison that once roamed the 

 prairies of North America, of the innumerable flocks of pigeons 

 that, in the same country, darken the skies for days in their 

 migration, of the mighty hosts of vegetable-eating mammals 

 in South Africa ? These are all cases where animals neither 

 devour others nor are devoured in their turn to any ap- 

 preciable extent. I presume my opponent will not have 

 recourse to the subterfuge of saying that the ox or the 

 elephant massacres minute insects in the grass or plants he 

 eats. In the first place, the fact is doubtful : blades of grass, 

 as a rule, are not favourite habitats pi insects, as any ento- 

 mologist will tell us; and secondly, we must really neglect 

 minute and microscopic life in an argument of such gene- 

 rality as this. 



Paley was probably right in saying that the vast multitudes 

 of vegetable-feeders lead a life of complete enjoyment. But 

 their tendency to multiply is so great that there must be some 

 check upon their numbers. In a state of nature, no better 

 check can be found than that of carnivorous animals, a 



