752 
AN ESSAY ON THE FUTURE EXISTENCE 
“ Indeed !” replied his friend ; “ but if you had witnessed the hair- 
breadth escape which I experienced of being devoured by a shark, 
in the West Indies, you would have been satisfied that the horrible 
monster entertained just the opposite opinion. He believed that 
man was created for him*.” 
“ But how many myriads of creatures exist that are not, and do 
not, appear to have ever been intended to be subservient to man’s 
use, except as constituting a part of the universal plan of which 
man himself is a part? Though he is said to be omnivorous, and 
insatiable in his eating propensities, there are many creatures 
which, happily for them, he cannot use as food, or render palatable 
by the condiments and appliances of luxury. Some are protected 
from his voracious jaws by their loathsome smell; some by their 
toughness, that will yield to no mastication; and others by their 
poisonous qualities. The medusae are too liquid, and the star-fish 
too earthy, to provoke his appetite. He does not feast on the 
toad, nor prepare ragouts of the slow-worm, nor luxuriously gorge 
on a fricassee of scorpions. What generations of the insect, the 
molluscous and crustaceous tribes, and of higher orders of animals 
too, of birds, beasts, fish, live and propagate their kinds, and die 
to give place to new generations, age after age, uninjured and un- 
known by man ! — some in the profound depths of the sea, which 
plummet never fathomed ; some on rocks and islands of the ocean, 
where sail was never spread; some in the lonely savannah, or 
howling wilderness of sand, where the foot of traveller never trod. 
The lion and the tiger have sometimes as good reason to say that 
man was made for them as they for him ; and the raven and the 
vulture, hovering over a field of battle, have still more reason for 
making a similar affirmation. The locusts lead forth their armies 
to desolate the earth and devour the fruits of man’s industry, as if 
he had toiled only to glut their rapacity, and having before them 
a land blooming like the ( Garden of God,’ leave it behind them 
turned to a desert, exhaling stench and rottenness. The polypi 
construct their coral bowers in the recesses of the deep, without 
asking permission of the biped who plumes himself as lord of 
the creation ; and when the war-ship is shivered to atoms on their 
rocky citadel, they may boast how low they can level the arrogance 
of those who came forth in the pride of their strength, chanting, 
‘ Britannia rules the Waves.’” 
No idea can be more erroneous, than that all animals were 
created for the sole purpose of being subservient to the uses of 
man ; and in nothing are his arrogance and self-conceit so obnox- 
ious as in upholding such a belief, though maintained by philo- 
sophers and sanctioned by divines. 
* Rights of Animals, by Dr. Drummond. 
