264 THE REV. THEODORE WOOD, F.E.S., ON 
acting upon the entire nervous system, induces a far higher 
susceptibility to suffering than would otherwise have been 
possible. And, as a general rule, it will be found that highly 
educated men and women are the most susceptible to bodily 
pain. They obtain, by their studies and mental culture, a 
great accession of intellectual power; but they pay the price 
in an increased sensitiveness of nervous organization. 
Among animals, too, we find a similar rule prevailing. The 
highly-bred, highly-trained race-horse or hunter will be 
thrown into a state of extreme nervous excitement by the 
merest touch of the whip or the spur. But the cart-horse, 
which is neither highly-bred nor highly-trained, and may be 
taken as the representative of equine un-education, plods 
stolidly on, apparently half unconscious of the blows which 
its impatient master is raining upon its back. So, too, with 
dogs ; the pure-bred animal—generally speaking, of course— 
suffers much more severely from a beating than the mongrel. 
To put the matter briefly, in fact, susceptibility to the sense 
of pain increases in exact proportion to the degree of perfec- 
tion attained, through evolution, civilization, or education, 
by the brain and the nervous system; and where the latter 
remain undeveloped, the former cannot be felt. 
WE have already seen how considerably the power of 
appreciating pain varies in the human subject ; how dependent 
it is upon the influences of civilization and education; how 
the degree in which pain can be felt, in fact, is proportionate 
to the degree of perfection attained by the brain, and (as a 
consequence) the nervous system. Now let us recollect what 
a vast difference there is between the brain and nervous 
system of even uncivilized man, and the brain and nervous 
system of the highest of the monkeys. In principle they may 
be similar; but in development now widely asunder! And 
as we work our way down the zoological ladder, the propor- 
tionate size of the brain—to say nothing of the delicacy of 
its organization—decreases at almost every successive step, 
until from man, with a brain of perhaps one-fortieth of his 
entire weight, we come to the carp, with a brain of only one 
eight-hundredth; while in the lancelet, the lowest of all the 
vertebrates, there is absolutely none. Would it not seem 
logically to follow, on this one ground alone, that the capacity 
for appreciating pain must be far lower in even the highest 
mammals than in man, and that it must decrease still further 
in proportion as the interval betweeu the two increases? 
