s truly wonderful, is, that
animals have often a sense of duty against their instincts. If it be
said that they act through fear of punishment, it is a punishment their
instincts would teach them to avoid; and, after all, this fear of
punishment may be a mighty ingredient in most men's consciences. We
learn that immense numbers of ducks are reared by that part of the
Chinese population who spend their lives in boats upon the rivers; and
these birds, salted and dried, form one of the chief articles of diet in
the celestial land. They are kept in large cages or crates, from which,
in the morning, they are sent forth to seek their food upon the river
banks. A whistle from their keeper brings them back in the evening; and
as, according to Tradescent Lay, the last to return receives a flogging
for his tardiness, their hurry to get back to the boats, when they hear
the accustomed call, is in no small degree amusing. I cannot but think
that there must be something like a sense of duty in these poor
creatures, that they thus of themselves, and of good-will return to the
certainty of being salted and dried. This may sound very ridiculous,
Eusebius, but there is matter in it to muse upon; and if we want to know
man, we must speculate a little beyond him, and learn him by similities
and differences. He has best knowledge of his own home and country who
has wandered into a _terra incognita_, and studied the differences of
soil and climate. And besides that every man is a world to himself, and
may find a _terra incognita_ in his own breast, it is not amiss to look
abroad into other wildernesses, where he will find instincts that are
not so much any creature's but that they have something divine in them,
and so, in their origin at least, akin to his own. He will find
conscience of some sort growing in the soil of every heart. It is not
amiss to discover where it grows most healthily, and by what deadly
nightshade its virtue may be suffocated, and its nicer sense not thrive.

Surprising is the diversity;--were not nature corrupted, there would be
no diversity. Now, truth and right is one; and yet we judge not one
thing, we think not aright. Yet is the original impulse true to its
purpose, but, in its passage through the many channels of the mind, is
strangely perverted. It is eloquently said by a modern writer, a deep
thinker, "Thus does the conscience of man project itself athwart
whatsoever of knowledge, or surmise, or imagination, u