Читать книгу The Evolutionist at Large - Allen Grant, Griffiths Arthur - Страница 8

Hoeing among the flower-beds on my lawn this morning – for I am a bit of a gardener in my way – I have had the ill-luck to maim a poor yellow slug, who had hidden himself among the encroaching grass on the edge of my little parterre of sky-blue lobelias. This unavoidable wounding and hacking of worms and insects, despite all one's care, is no small drawback to the pleasures of gardening in propriâ personâ. Vivisection for genuine scientific purposes in responsible hands, one can understand and tolerate, even though lacking the heart for it oneself; but the useless and causeless vivisection which cannot be prevented in every ordinary piece of farm-work seems a gratuitous blot upon the face of beneficent nature. My only consolation lies in the half-formed belief that feeling among these lower creatures is indefinite, and that pain appears to affect them far less acutely than it affects warm-blooded animals. Their nerves are so rudely distributed in loose knots all over the body, instead of being closely bound together into a single central system as with ourselves, that they can scarcely possess a consciousness of pain at all analogous to our own. A wasp whose head has been severed from its body and stuck upon a pin, will still greedily suck up honey with its throatless mouth; while an Italian mantis, similarly treated, will calmly continue to hunt and dart at midges with its decapitated trunk and limbs, quite forgetful of the fact that it has got no mandibles left to eat them with. These peculiarities lead one to hope that insects may feel pain less than we fear. Yet I dare scarcely utter the hope, lest it should lead any thoughtless hearer to act upon the very questionable belief, as they say even the amiable enthusiasts of Port Royal acted upon the doctrine that animals were mere unconscious automata, by pushing their theory to the too practical length of active cruelty. Let us at least give the slugs and beetles the benefit of the doubt. People often say that science makes men unfeeling: for my own part, I fancy it makes them only the more humane, since they are the better able dimly to figure to themselves the pleasures and pains of humbler beings as they really are. The man of science perhaps realises more vividly than all other men the inner life and vague rights even of crawling worms and ugly earwigs.