What pretensions can these people have to delicate feeling
and sensations of horror for animal suffering, whose great delight
is to witness, like the barbarous Romans, a miserable
criminal, perhaps for a very slight offence, tom in pieces by
tygers and buffalos? Neither is it more likely that, in a
country where animal existence is so abundantly produced
and abundantly destroyed, the forbearance should
have originated in any peculiar degree of respect and value
for animal life. I t is scarcity that in general constitutes
Value.
The tomd zone indeed is probably Hot the country in
which such a system had its origin—where all nature is in a
state of visible animation—where the naked earth, the woods,
the waters, and even the rocks under the waters, are teeming
with animal life—where every step that a man takes, every
time that he opens his mouth, whether to inhale the atmospheric
air, to quench his thirst with pure water, or to eat
his lifeless vegetables (as he is willing to suppose them), he
necessarily destroys myriads of living and sentient beings.
With as little propriety can such aJsystem, so misplaced, be
referred to any refined notions of meVcy and benevolence
but may, perhaps, more properly be considered as one
of those unaccountable institutions which are sometimes
found to militate against local consistency, and which afford
no slight argument in favour of their foreign origin. On
the same ground of reasoning we might venture, perhaps, to
Infer that the Consecration of the cow is more likely to have
had its origin on the bleak and barren heights of Tartary than
•n the warm and fertile plains of Hindostán.
7
In Java every object seems to be impregnated with life.
A glass of water taken out of the canal of Batavia becomes,
in the course of a few hours, a mass of animated matter, the
minute portions of which, multiplying by division and subdivision,
move about with astonishing rapidity. The bay,
swarming with myriads of living creatures, exhibits, in the
night time, a phosphorescent light like a sheet of fire. The
stream of fresh water which falls into it, being more highly
charged with animal life, is distinctly traced in the bay by a
train more luminous and brilliant than the rest of the surface,
appearing like another milky way in the midst of a firmament
of stars.
Whether the Hindoos framed the strange doctrine of transmigration
of the vital principle into different animals, or borrowed
it from other countries where animal life was less
abundant, and therefore of more value, than in India, their
absurdities are, in either case, fully as defensible as those
of some of our modem philosophers who, in a glare of fine
phrases, have assiduously endeavoured to propagate the unfounded
doctrine of a fortuitous and spontaneous vivification
of inanimate matter. If, in any single instance, it could be
shewn that animal life had been produced under a fortuitous
concurrence of favourable circumstances, one would be the
less surprized at the adoption of such preposterous notions as
“ faculties being obtained simply by wishing for them”—that
“ from organic particles accumulated, originate animal ap-
“ petencies”—that
“ Hence without parent» by spontaneous birth»
“ Rise the first specks of animated earth.*'