[September, 
568 A Change of Front . 
adts exactly so, is not to be denounced either as a “bungler” 
or accused of cruelty. We who, in old-fashioned language, 
“ wear the shoe ” are not to be allowed to say where it 
pinches ! Mr. Baildon contends that there is no unneces- 
sary or useless pain, and enlarges on the ennobling influ- 
ences of suffering. Did he ever hear of a man who was 
ennobled, morally, intellectually, or physically, by a brood 
of chigoes in his feet, by having his palate cut to pieces by 
the larvse of Lucilia hominivora , or by having his rest broken 
night after night by mosquitoes ? A word about these same 
mosquitoes, using the word in an unscientific sense to 
include all the blood-sucking Culicidae and Tipulidae : is 
there any necessity for their existence at all ? If such there 
be, it is certainly not necessary that they should suck human 
blood, since millions upon millions of them live and die 
without ever settling upon man or any other mammalian. 
Would not a slight change in the odour of our juices, or, if 
that were too difficult to effeCt, a slight alteration in their 
own tastes, solve the difficulty, and deliver mankind from 
much torment without injuring the insedts ? Surely, then, 
we have here a case of useless, needless suffering. It has 
been further ascertained, contrary to what was once dreamed, 
that, so far from being of sanitary utility, they serve as 
transmitters of disease, and that their larvae intensify the 
putrefaction of organic matter in the waters. We may 
similarly examine the properties and characteristics of the 
parasites which prey upon man, creatures doubtfully even 
conscious of their own existence. Yet it is to such beings 
that Nature sacrifices the weal of man, “ her first mate and 
conqueror and monarch !” I do not, indeed, venture to 
pronounce all this suffering unjust ; but may certainly con- 
clude that if a maximum of earthly enjoyment and a 
minimisation of earthly suffering had been the objects of the 
Creator, the world would assuredly have been constituted 
very differently from what it is. 
In another respeCt Mr. Baildon is at variance with the 
teachings of the New Natural History. He asserts, con 
strepitu, that the beauty of certain organisms exists for the 
edification of man, and, in a passage which I cannot pro- 
nounce other than deplorable, he speaks as if Mr. Darwin, 
in maintaining that “ all this beauty ” has arisen xt without 
design or purpose,” — i.e., without reference to man,— denied 
the very existence of the beautiful. Now fadts do not har- 
monise with this purposive notion of beauty. We find 
multitudes of creatures exquisitely coloured — Adtinise, 
Crustacea, and Mollusca — inhabiting the depths of the sea. 
