ESSAY I. 411 sects which they prey upon, viz. the ants, and the flies, and the worms? And have any of these sinned against their Maker, or degenerated from the first laws oftheir creation ? Again, I would enquire, are not harmful and bloody accidents much more com- mon among many of the brutes than they are amongst mankind ? A horse stalking over an ant-hill shall crush a hundred of the busy inhabitants with his broad and heavy foot, lay a whole king- dom in desolation at once, and leave multitudes of their little 'members bruised and broken, and the tiny creatures expiring in anguish ? And if their organs were strong enough to form a, sound which could reach our ears, what shrill outcries and screams, what dying groans, what innumerableaccents of misery would arise from this little mangled nation, and pierce the heart of a compassionate traveller on every suchaccident ? And let me ask now, did these diminutive animals, these tiny atoms of being ever offend the hand that formed them ? Or are they in a wòrse state or condition than they were at first formed ? or are they liable to any new accidents which their original nature and constitution does not expose them to ? Yet further let us ask, do not sweeping storms and famine and pestilence sometimes make wretched havoc among whole nations of the brutal kind, and spread the fields and the woods with distress and desolation ? And in fine, do not the distempers of nature whichare found amongst them, or the length of years bring them all down to death, and sometimes with tedious agonies and convulsive pangs ? And yet can we say that God is angrywith them, or that they are under any worse circum- stances of life than what God at first formed them for? But let us pursue the detail of their miseries yet further. Both not matt destroy thousands of them continually for his own food, and that by divine appointment ? Are not birds snared by the fowler in a mortal net, or shot in flocks with murdering gun-powder and enginesof spreading destruction ? And the rest which escape by flight, how painfully do many of them drag on a lingering life among wounds and bruises ? Are not oysters churned alive between our teeth ? Are not millions of living shell-fishboiled to death in caldrons, and finny animals in shoals taken out of the sea and rivers, and while leaping with life, they are fried in burningoil, or other scalding liquids ? Howmany painful cir- cumstances must some ofthese creatures necessarilypass through, even if we would catch and fit them for our food in the easiest - manner? But generally their manner of dying is more pain. ful misery, and death is brought upon multitudes of the brute- creation, merely as they are the appointed support of men and ether animals, besides all the other accidents, pains anddiseases that attend them. Now notwithstanding all these miseries which are spread
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