MAN is the direct agent of a wide and continual distress to the lower animals; and the question is, "Can any method be devised for its alleviation?" On this subject that ural image is strikingly realized: "the whole [inferior] creation groaning and travailing together in pain" because of him. It signifies naught to the substantive amount of the suffering, whether it be prompted by the hardness of his heart, or only permitted through the heedlessness of his mind. In either way①it holds true, not only that the arch-devourer Manstandspre?minent over the fiercest children of the wilderness as an animal of prey, but that for his lordly and luxurious appetite, as well as for his service or merest curiosity and amusement, Nature must be ransacked throughout all her elements. Rather than forego the veriest gratifications of vanity, he will wring them from the anguish of wretched and ill-fated creatures; and whether for the indulgence of his barbaric sensuality or his barbaric splendour, he can stalk paramount over the sufferings of that prostrate creation which has been placed beneath his feet.
These sufferings are really felt. The beasts of the field are②not so many automatawithout sensation, so constructed as
to assume all the natural expressions of it. Nature hath not practised this universal deception upon our species. These poor animals just look, and tremble, and give forth the very indications of suffering that we do. Theirs is the distinct cry of pain. Theirs is the unequivocal physiognomy of pain. They put on the same aspect of terror on the demonstrations of a menaced blow. They exhibit the same distortions of agony after the infliction of it. The bruise, or the burn, orthe fracture, or the deep incision, or the fierce encounter with one of equal or of superior strength, affects them similarly to ourselves. Their blood circulates as ours. They have pulsations in various parts of the body as we have. They sicken, and they grow feeble with age, and, finally, they die, just as we do.
They possess the same feelings; and, what exposes them to like sufferings from another quarter, they possess the same instincts with our own species. The lioness robbed of her whelps causes the wilderness to ring aloud with the proclamation of her wrongs; or the bird whose little household has been stolen fills and saddens all the grove with melodies of deepest pathos. All this is palpable even to the general③and unlearned eye; and when the physiologistlays open therecesses of their system, by means of that scalpel under whose operation they just shrink and are convulsed as any living subject of our own species, there stands forth to view the same sentient apparatus,④ and furnished with the same conductors for the transmission of feeling from every minutest pore upon the surface.
Theirs is unmixed and unmitigated pain, the agonies of martyrdom without the alleviation of the hopes and the sentiments whereof men are capable. When they lay them down to die, their only fellowship is with suffering; for in the prison-house of their beset and bounded faculties, no relief can be afforded by communion with other interests or other things. The attention does not lighten their distress, as it does that of man, by carrying off his spirit from that existing pungency and pressure which might else be overwhelming. There is but room in their mysterious economy for one inmate; and that is, the absorbing sense of their own singleand concentrated anguish. And so on that bed of torment whereon the wounded animal lingers and expires, there is an unexplored depth and intensity of suffering which thepoor dumb animal itself cannot tell, and against which it can offer no remonstrance-an untold and unknown amount of wretchedness of which no articulate voice gives utterance.
- THOMAS CHALMERS
WORDS
alleviation, mitigation. articulate, distinct. communion, intercourse. concentrated, self-contained. constructed, put together.
convulsed, affected spasmodically.
deception, fraud. distortions, writhings. gratification, indulgence. heedlessness, carelessness. instinct, natural impulse. luxurious, sensual.
mysterious, incomprehensible.
paramount, chief.
physiognomy, expression of face.
pre?minent, supreme. proclamation, publication. prompted, suggested. prostrate, down-trodden. pulsations, throbbings. pungency, sharpness. ransacked, pillaged. remonstrance, expostulation. scalpel, dissecting knife. substantive, actual.
travailing, labouring with pain. unequivocal, unmistakable. unmitigated, undiminished. wretchedness, misery.
NOTES
① Arch-devourer Man. He feeds on animals, vegetables, and minerals.
② Automata, lifeless machines, moved by concealed works, so as to imitate the actions of living creatures. The singular is autom"aton.
③ Physiologist, one who studies and expounds physiology ,-the science which treats ofthe nature and organization of living bodies.
④ Sentient apparatus, apparatus of the feelings; that is, the nerve system.
⑤ Thomas Chalmers.-An eloquent preacher and distinguished philanthropist of the nineteenth century. He was also a devoted student of mathematics and natural science. His writings present a remarkable combination of religious fervour with scientific enthusiasm; for example, his Astronomical Discourses , and his Bridge water Treatise On the Adaptation of External Nature to the Moral and Intellectual Constitution of Man. Born 1780; died 1847.
