28 OBJECTIONS ANSWERED. 
line, or of the hunted hare, being, beyond comparison, greater than those 
of insects destroyed in the usual mode. Withrespect to utility, the sports- 
man who, though he adds indeed to the general stock of food, makes 
amusement his primary object, must surely yield the palm to the entomo- 
logist, who adds to the general stock of mental food, often supplies hints 
for useful improvements in the arts and sciences, and the objects of whose 
pursuit, unlike those of the former, are preserved, and may be applied to 
use for many years. 
But in the view even of those few who think inhumanity chargeable 
upon the sportsman, it will be easy to place considerations which may 
rescue the entomologist from such reproof. It is well known that, in pro- 
portion as we descend in the scale of being, the sensibility of the objects 
that constitute it diminishes. The tortoise walks about after losing its 
head ; and the polypus, so far from being injured by the application of the 
knife, thereby acquires an extension of existence. Insensibility almost 
equally great may be found in the insect world. This, indeed, might be 
interred @ priori; since Providence seems to have been more prodigal of — 
insect life than of that of any other order of creatures, animalcula perhaps 
alone’ excepted. No part of the creation is exposed to the attack of so 
many ‘enemies, or subject to so many disasters ; so that the few individuals 
of each kind which enrich the valued museum of the entomologist, many 
of which are dearer to him than gold or gems, are snatched from the 
ravenous maw of some bird or fish or rapacious insect—would have been 
driven by the winds into the waters and drowned, or trodden underfoot by 
man or beast; for it is not easy, in some parts of the year, to set foot to 
the ground without crushing these minute animals; and thus also, instead 
of being buried in oblivion, they have a kind of immortality conferred upon 
them. Can it be believed that the beneficent Creator, whose tender 
mercies are over all his works, would expose these helpless beings to such 
innumerable enemies and injuries, were they endued with the same sense 
of pain and irritability of nerve with the higher orders of animals ? 
But this inference is reduced to certainty, when we attend to the facts 
which insects every day present to us, proving that the very converse of 
our great poet’s conclusion, as usually interpreted, 
suheney JDlie poor beetle that we tread upon 
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great 
As when a giant dies, 
must be regarded as nearer the truth.! Not to mention the peculiar orga- 
nisation of insects, which strongly favours the idea I am inculcating, but 
which will be considered more properly in another place, their sang-froid 
upon the loss of their limbs, even those that we account most necessary to 
life, irrefragably proves that the pain they suffer cannot be very acute. 
Had a giant lost an arm or a leg, or were a sword or spear run through his 
body, he would feel no great inclination for running about, dancing or 
eating; yet a crane-fly (Z%pula) will leave half its legs in the hands of an 
1 Shakspeare’s intention, however, in this passage, was evidently not, as is often 
supposed, to excite compassion for the insect, but to prove that 
‘The sense of Death is most in apprehension, 
the actual pang being trifling.— Measure for Measure, Act iii. Sc. 1. 
