BIRD, BEAST AND HUNTER. 21 
und 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 Grahamite, 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 
