re an inferior order of animals fixed to the soil; and as
the locomotive animals prey upon them, or upon each other;
the world may indeed be said to be one great slaughter-house.
As the digested food of vegetables consists principally of
sugar, and from this is produced again their mucilage,
starch, and oil, and since animals are sustained by these
vegetable productions, it would seem that the sugar-making
process carried on in vegetable vessels was the great source
of life to all organized beings. And that if our improved
chemistry should ever discover the art of making sugar from
fossile or aerial matter without the assistance of
vegetation, food for animals would then become as plentiful
as water, and they might live upon the earth without preying
on each other, as thick as blades of grass, with no restraint
to their numbers but the want of local room.

It would seem that roots fixed in the earth and leaves
innumerable waving in the air were necessary for the
decomposition of water and air, and the conversion of them
into saccharine matter, which would have been not only
cumberous but totally incompatible with the locomotion of
animal bodies. For how could a man or quadruped have carried
on his head or back a forest of leaves, or have had long
branching lacteal or absorbent vessels terminating in the
earth? Animals therefore subsist on vegetables; that is they
take the matter so prepared, and have organs to prepare it
further for the purposes of higher animation and greater
sensibility.]

"THE brow of Man erect, with thought elate,
Ducks to the mandate of resistless fate;
Nor Love retains him, nor can Virtue save
Her sages, saints, or heroes from the grave. 70
While cold and hunger by defect oppress,
Repletion, heat, and labour by excess,
The whip, the sting, the spur, the fiery brand,
And, cursed Slavery! thy iron hand;
And led by Luxury Disease's trains,
Load human life with unextinguish'd pains.

[Footnote: _While cold and hunger_, l. 71. Those parts of our
system, which are in health excited into perpetual action,
give us pain, when they are not excited into action: thus
when the hands are for a time