read idea of the cruelty of Nature is {60} almost wholly
imaginary."[7] "Our whole tendency to transfer _our_ sensations of
pain to the other animals is grossly misleading."[8]

"No other animal _needs_ the pain-sensations that we need; it is
therefore absolutely certain--on principles of evolution--that no other
possesses such sensations in more than a fractional degree of ours."[9]

"In the category of painless or almost painless animals, I think we may
place almost all aquatic animals up to fishes, all the vast hordes of
insects, probably all mollusca and worms; thus reducing the sphere of
pain to a minimum throughout all the earlier geological ages, and very
largely even now."[10]

"The purpose and use of all parasitic diseases is to seize upon the
less adapted and less healthy individuals--those which are slowly dying
and no longer of value in the preservation of the species, and
therefore to a certain extent injurious to the race by requiring food
and occupying space needed by the more fit."[11]

Speaking of "the vicious-looking teeth and claws of the cat tribe, the
hooked beak and prehensile talons of birds of prey, the poison fangs of
serpents, the stings of wasps and many others," Dr. Wallace {61}
writes; "The idea that all these weapons exist for the _purpose_ of
shedding blood or giving pain is wholly illusory. As a matter of fact,
their effect is wholly beneficent even to the sufferers, inasmuch as
they tend to the diminution of pain. Their actual purpose is always to
prevent the escape of captured food--of a wounded animal, which would
then, indeed, suffer _useless_ pain, since it would certainly very soon
be captured again and be devoured." "All conclusions derived from the
house-fed cat and mouse are fallacious."[12] Finally he concludes by
inveighing against "the ludicrously exaggerated view adopted by men of
such eminence and usually of such calm judgment as Huxley--a view
almost as far removed from fact or science as the purely imaginary and
humanitarian dogma of the poet:

'The poor beetle, that we tread upon,
In corporal sufferance finds a pang as great
As when a giant dies.'

Whatever the giant may feel, if the theory of Evolution is true, the
'poor beetle' certainly {62} feels an almost irreducible minimum of
pain, probably none at all."[13]

We may add to all these considerations the further fact that we are
constantly finding out that things have their use which had been too