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NATURE NOTES 
Our Animal Friends. Vol. xxxi., No. 1, September, 1903. Price 10 cents. 
We congratulate our venerable transatlantic contemporary on appearing in a 
new, handier, and illustrated form. 
Animal World Illustrated. August and September. Price 2d. monthly. 
We wish we could see an improvement in our R.S.P.C.A.’s organ comparable 
to that of its American sister journal, but it remains as childish as ever, though 
we were long ago promised something more suited for adults. In the August 
number is an article on the sundew that bristles with errors. Two of its illustra- 
tions are described as Drosera rotundijlora and Drosera Angelica. These plants 
are said to be “ pretty well confined to the north,” and their leaves to be sur- 
rounded by 41 hollow ” hairs. 
Received : Board of Agriculture Leaflets , Nos. 88, 91, 92 ; Hop Aphis , The 
Pine Beetle, Bunt and Smut ; The Victorian Naturalist for July; Devonia for 
June; The American Botanist for June and July; The Animals’ Friend for 
August ; The Humanitarian, The Irish Naturalist, and The Agricultural Econo- 
mist for August and September ; and The Commonwealth for September. 
NATURAL HISTORY NOTES. 
32. Is Nature Cruel ? — -The majority of persons who never study Nature, 
look upon her as beautiful and charming, but at the same time they consider 
her a cruel tyrant, oppressing the weak in favour of the strong, and inflicting untold 
agonies on her victims, which “ all-inventive man,” as Sophocles calls him, has 
succeeded in escaping through his superior brain. Nor are those persons who 
thoroughly study her without this view. A cat playing with a mouse, a spider 
“ mesmerising ” a fly, the tiger’s deadly spring on the antelope, the hawk’s fell 
swoop on the cowering bird, the hunted stag, fox and hare, the wounded grouse, 
the trout’s last leap for life to break the angler’s “gut,” all appear to be the em- 
bodiment of tyrannical cruelty even to the most ardent lover of Nature. Now 
with reference to all this, I should like to direct your readers’ attention to a book 
which has appeared only recently and is called the “School of the Woods,” by 
William Long. The great underlying principle in that book, which I cannot 
but think correct, is that it is perfectly inconceivable, throughout all these 
thousands of years, during which animals have lived in their natural conditions 
without man’s interference, that the species of animals which are constantly 
preyed upon by stronger forms of life could possibly have survived the pain and 
terror of intense watchfulness and anxiety for themselves and for their young 
without some help from Mother Nature to alleviate their labours ; that is, that 
their bodies could not stand the strain and they would become extinct. Although 
he does not say that in so many words, yet he proves what comes to exactly the 
same thing, namely, that animals are relieved from the pain and anxiety which 
we should be addicted to if we were in the same state. Mr. Daubeny, who has 
appeared as the champion against Nature in your columns, notes various instances 
in your last issue, and amongst others, one of apparent cruelty of a beetle to a 
worm, which latter preferred the open pathway and the chance of being picked 
up by birds to being devoured by the beetle in his underground hole. But the 
struggles of the worm in his endeavours to escape might just as well have been 
the instinct of self-preservation which was probably taught to him in his childhood 
by his parents, viz., to wriggle away and expose himself to any danger rather 
than to allow himself to be captured by the arch-enemy of the worm tribe. This 
teaching, by the bye, is always resorted to among the higher forms of wild 
animals to their young, namely, to obey their parents and to get away from danger, 
not necessarily to put themselves in mortal terror of it. Why then should this 
teaching not extend to the worm as w’ell ? I know that this theory needs more 
proof, only Mr. Daubeny’s theory needs proof also, and the chances being even, 
why should not Nature, who orders the movements of every living thing, be 
a kind and gracious being instead of a wicked and cruel tyrant ? There is no 
reason why she should not, and there is no reason why she should ; but when 
one sees the joyfulness of most of Nature’s wild things, such as the trout, which 
