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Mr Pennant calmly describes this more than savage custom, as follows. "The geese are pluck. ed five times in the year: the first plucking is at Lady-day, for feathers and quills; and the same is renewed, for feathers only, four times more between that and Michaelmas. The old geese submit quietly, to the operation, but the young ones are very noisy and unruly. I once saw this performed, and observed that goslings of six weeks old were not spared; for their tails were plucked, as I was told, to habituate them early to what they were to come to. If the season prove cold, numbers of the geese die by this barbarous custom."

ENTOMOLOGY. The Entomologist or Collector of Insects, practises the most unrelenting cruelties on flies, moths and spiders. The papilionaceous race are impaled for days and weeks on corking pins. The libellutæ, or dragon-flies, are killed by squeezing the thorax, or with the spirit of turpentine.

Naturalists, of some feeling, find it difficult to kill the largest kinds of Moths and Sphinxes. The corking pin, on which they are impaled, is usually dipped in aquafortis, pierced through the body, then withdrawn and a drop of the aquafortis put into the wound. Should this prove insufficient, the point of the pin is put through a card and held in the flame of a candle till it be red hot. Fumigations of sulphur are said to destroy the beauty of the insect; and do not always succeed; not even when exposed under a glass with burning sulphur for half an hour. The Libellutæ tribe are destroyed by a red hot wire being run up the body and thorax.-Donovan on the Management of Insects.

Science may certainly be improved, and learning increased without the practice of such barbarities.

'Tis a worthless science which is acquired at the expense of that humanity which is highly necessary in our journey through life. The cruelty, not to say ingratitude, of gibbeting or impaling alive, so many innocent beautiful beings, in return for the pleasure they afford us in the display of their lovely tints and glowing colours, is abominable.

Could the figure, instincts, and qualities of birds, beasts, insects, reptiles and fish be ascertained," says Sir William Jones, "either on the plan of Buffon, or on that of Linnæus, without giving pain to the objects of our examination, few studies would afford us more solid instruction, or more exquisite delight: but I never could learn by what right, nor conceive with what feelings, a naturalist can occasion the misery of an innocent bird, and leave it's young, perhaps, to perish in a cold nest, because it has gay plumage, and has never been accurately delineated; or deprive, even a butterfly, of it's natural enjoyments, because it has the misfortune to be rare and beautiful: nor shall I ever forget the couplet of Ferdausi, for which Sadi, who cites it with applause, pours blessings on his departed spirit.

Ah! spare yon emmet, rich in hoarded grain; he lives in pleasure, but he dies with pain."

Teignmouth's Memoirs, v. ii, p. 356.

THE PRESERVING OF BIRDS AND ANIMALS, has, of late years, become a trade, among the com monest mechanics, whose employment it is to destroy them for the purpose of disposing of their bodies, after they are fitted up in boxes with glass before them. Many have been thus savagely curious in purchasing great numbers of them to decorate rooms, which they take pleasure in exhibiting to their friends.

Some obtain birds by finding their nests, and then,

some day afterwards, advance cautiously to the places and put over them a hand-net. In this manner they frequently take both the parents; or, by taking one of them, they generally obtain the other with a gun! Such is the progress which men make in barbarity, while they are complimented as ingenious! They may indeed be ingenious, but they are ingenious in crime, and merit the title of Ingenious Monsters.

ANATOMISTS. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge, is a race of wretches whose lives are only distinguished by varieties of cruelty. Their favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth or injected into the veins. It is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind, but since they are continually published with ostentation, let me be allowed to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence. Mead has invidiously remarked of Woodward, that he gathered shells and stones, and intended to pass for a philosopher. With pretensions much less reasonable, the anatomi. cal novice tears out the living bowels of an animal, and styles himself physician!

What is alleged in defence of these hateful practices, every one knows; but the truth is, that by knives, fire, and poison, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. The experiments which have been tried, are tried again; he that burned an animal with irons yesterday, will be willing to amuse himself with burning another to-morrow. I

know not that by living dissections, any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured: and, if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely pays too much for knowledge when he learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his humanity.

The faithful dog (whose attachment and gratitude are exemplary and worthy the imitation of man, when with a farmer or country 'squire, is well fed, and has no great cause of complaint, except on account of the loss of his ears and tail, which were lopt off to improve nature; and on account of now and then a bruise or broken rib, from gentle spurns: but if the poor quadruped falls into the hands of a tanner, an anatomist, or experimental philosopher, alas! of what avail are his good qualities? These canine unfortunates are frequently tortured for the good of mankind! Some have their throats cut to prove the efficacy of a styptic, others are bled to death for a philosophical effusion, and many animals resign their breath in the receiver of an air-pump. Unfortunate animals!

It is impossible to read the experiments made by Browne Langrish, read before the Royal Society, and published in 1746, under the title of "Physical Experiments on Brutes," without sensations of horror. After the injection of various corrosive menstruums in. to the bladders of dogs, they were hung, for the sake of examination; but others died in the most dread. ful convulsions. The stomach of a dog was cut out while alive, in order to try whether the liquor Gastricus would be coagulated by it. But the most dreadful of his experiments are those made on dogs, to ascertain by what means the fumes of sulphur de stroy an animal body. He cut asunder the wind

pipes of dogs, so that the fumes could not reach the lungs, and then, fixing the head through a hole in a wainscot, he proceeded to the most wanton of experiments. The miserable creatures foamed at the mouth, roared hideously, or died in excruciating torture. This author, in the winding up of one part of his work, talks of the pleasure, variety, and usefulness of his experiments! In this manner these privileged tyrants sport away the lives and revel in the agonies and tortures of creatures, whose sensations are as delicate, and whose natural right to an unpainful enjoyment of life is as great as that of man.

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The monthly reviewers, after examining a new physiological theory, contained in "Experiments on the Cause of Heat in living Animals, &c. by John Caverhill, M. D. M. R. C. P. F. R. S." add, we claim no small degree of merit, with our readers, in having, for their information, read the numerous and cruel experiments related in this pamphlet throughout; the perusal of which was, attended with a continual shudder at the repeated recital of such a number of instances of the most deliberate and unrelenting cruelty, exercised on several scores of rabbits, in order to ascertain the truth of a strange and extravagant hypothesis. At every page, we read of awls stuck between the vertebræ, [joints of the back bone] and into the spinal marrow of living rabbits, who exhibit, at the time, every symptom of exquisite pain, and live ten, twelve, and even nineteen days afterwards; their bladders sometimes bursting, in consequence of their losing the power of expelling the urine accumulated in them, unless when the unfeeling operator, not out of tenderness, but to protract the miserable life of the suffering animal, as long as possible, in order to render the experiment more

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