THE FALSEHOOD OF EXTREMES. 
243 
imagined, and all right-thinking women will, I feel sure, abstain from wearing 
this fabric, soft and fine though it is. In selecting materials for winter wear, they 
will do well to satisfy themselves that they are not perpetuating a practice that is 
abhorrent to all our notions of humanity. 
We fail to see any advantage in the publication of this kind 
of thing, and only reprint it as an example of what should be 
avoided. 
There is danger of exaggeration in other directions. We 
have received a parcel of the publications issued by Messrs. Bell 
& Sons for the Humanitarian League. Some of these we have 
already noticed favourably, and those now before us" are all 
well printed, admirably illustrated, and eminently readable. 
Yet here and there we find a strained note — as, for example, in 
Animals in the Wrong Places. We are no advocates for the caging 
of birds, but it is surely an exaggeration to say that “ to a truly 
merciful man or woman a bird in a cage is a source of lasting 
sorrow ” ? Some of the most tender-hearted folk have kept both 
birds and animals in captivity ; and we should never have had 
the delightful series of books with which IMrs. Brightwen has 
enriched our Selbornian literature, had she not been able to 
observe their habits and study their characters. In one of these 
little books we note that Miss Carrington says that the supply 
of ostrich plumes “involves undoubted cruelty.” Perhaps she 
has evidence which justifies this statement, but none is pro- 
duced ; and so far it appears J:o us that those best likely to 
know from personal experience have decided otherwise. The 
matter was treated at some length in N. N. for 1890, pp. 39-42. 
There is also a curious tendency in these books to treat the 
question of kindness to animals as if it were a side of ethics 
which had not been discovered until somewhere about the 
present century, except, perhaps, by certain enlightened pagans, 
such as Plutarch. We look in vain for any mention of the Poor 
Man of Assisi — 
“ He that, in his catholic wholeness, used to call the very flowers 
Sisters, brothers ; and the beasts, whose pains are scarcely less than ours ; ” 
and yet his influence has not been slight, nor has it passed away. 
Of this we have had a recent example : a lady who had resisted 
all attempts to induce her to remove an “ osprey ’’from her hat, 
reflected that such an ornament would hardly be deemed suit- 
able by the founder of the religious order of which she was a 
tertiary, and thus the influence of St. Francis brought about a 
reform which no appeal to humanity would have wrought. 
Perhaps, indeed, the absence of reference to anything higher 
than humanity is one of the most striking features of the series. 
* Featherland. by G. Manvilie Fenn, is. ; Friendship of Animals, by Edith 
Carrington, is. ; From Many Lands, by the same, 2s. ; Natures Wonders, by 
the same, is. ; The Cat, by the same, is. ; Animals in the Wrong Places, by the 
same, is. ; The Animals on Strike, is. ; Tuppy, the Autobio^ra^iy of a Donkey, 
IS. 
