Noxious Animals

We have already observed in a former Number that this is a subject upon which philosophers seem to know nothing; and divines, from whom a little more intelligence might; reasonably be expected, know as little. The latter seem generally to regard the creation of such animals as a punishment for man’s eating of the forbidden fruit; but somehow or other this reason is becoming obsolete, like an old law that is not repealed, but has become inactive through the force of public opinion. It wants justice to commend it to human acceptation. Beside, it is a mere offspring of the middle ages; there is no warrant for it in Holy Writ – on the contrary, the serpent, one of the very noxious creatures made, appears to have been more noxious before the fall than he has ever been since; and it one such wicked creature was found in Eden, why not more?

The only plausible argument which divines have for any change in creation after the first is to be found in the words – “To every beast of the field, and to every fowl of the air, and to everything that creepeth upon the earth, wherein there is life, I have given every green herb for meat.” This they say, includes not animal food, and implies a state of innocence. It is a negative argument, which merely omits the mention of animal food, but does not positively forbid it; and the force of the argument would remain till after the flood, for there is no positive allowance of animal food in direct terms till Noah came from the ark. This proves too much. Dr Kirby in his Bridgewater Treatise says that the now carnivorous animals “must have originally eaten straw like the ox, and neither injured nor destroyed their fellow beast of a more harmless character” – why more harmless character? They must have been all alike harmless; and if the change took place that put an end to their harmlessness, why was the lion made carnivorous and the ox and horse not? Why one more noxious and the other less? Why one class a victim and the other a destroyer? The change implies a new creation, a total repeal of the first creation, and an entire remodelling of the economy of the vegetable and animal world. It is a bold assertion to make, especially when there is no direct or even plausible evidence for the supposition. Yet this is the opinion of the philosophical divine, whose essay on the creation of animals, as evidence of the power, wisdom, and goodness of God, forms one of the celebrated Bridgewater Treatises. He supposes that this primary state of innocence in animals continued “probably long after the fall, to allow sufficient time for such a multiplication of the flocks and herds, and flights and shoals of the gregarious animals, as would secure them from extinction.” However, he acknowledge that discord began to display itself immediately after the fall, and he quotes no less an authority than John Milson, a radical divine and poet, for such a supposition –

Beast now with beast, ‘gan war, and fowl with fowl,
And fish with fish – to graze the herb all leaving,
Devoured each other.

The poet authority seems to go farther than the divine, for the poet begins the devouring immediately, as if the fangs, and claws, and other instruments of torture had all been previously prepared, and only waited the signal from Eve to begin. “Had not Adam fallen,” says the English divine, “this sad change probably would never have taken place;” and then for want of scriptural proof again, he quotes the Apocrypha, of which the Church of England says that it doeth not apply the Apocrypha to establish any doctrine. All this difficulty arises from the assumption that man was made not only without sin (and how could he have been created with it) but without a tendency to sin, and made immortal also without a tendency to death – popular fallacies begotten by poets’ brains in the perusal of a mystic word which nowhere teaches any such doctrine, but merely leaves it possible for a wandering uninstructed fancy to build such a theory upon it. Man was made innocent of course; he could not have been created guilty; but he was made very susceptible to guilt, for he fell into it immediately on the first temptation. No one of the fallen race is now more erring than Eve was in her unfallen state. She was as easily seduced in her state of innocence as we are in our state of guilt. All other animals were likewise created in a state of innocence and harmlessness, for the first pair of wolves, or foxes, could not have been guilty of devouring sheep or stealing poultry till after they were created; but they took to their vocation naturally, as Eve and Adam did when they found an opportunity and temptation, and having once tasted blood they liked it, because they were created to like it – as Dr. Watts tells little children in his well known hymns –

Let dogs delight to bark and bite,
For God hath made them so;
Let bears and lions growl and fight,
For ‘tis their nature too –

Not “TO,” as the Times newspaper quoted in lately, finding fault with the doctor’s grammar.

Dr. Kirby jumps over his difficulties like a kangaroo; they seem to give him no trouble at all; he not only makes lions and tigers, and other carnivorous animals, eaters of grass and herbs before the fall, but he seems to think that there were no noxious insects, such as those that infest man’s own body and food, created till after it. Le Clerc and Bonnel, and many others no doubt, believe that all these creatures existed in man before he fell, and were afterwards developed from original ova; but Dr. Kirby will not admit of this supposition, and he drops upon a discovery that seems to delight him, namely, that lice were created originally in Egypt in the time of Moses, as one of the plagues. “It is evident,” he says, “that here is the creation of an animal in great numbers; and what is worthy of particular observation, that this animal was not afterwards annihilated, as the frogs and others were. What has evidently been done once under circumstances that required it may have been repeated; and thus all the punitive species in question may have been produced.”

These punitive insects, therefore, are, according to the reverend doctor’s hypothesis, the last creation, and have been brought into being successively at different epochs, to punish man for his sins – but this leaves the question just where it was; for it is not man alone who is punished with such punitive creatures, but irrational animals also. Indeed the poor brute is more persecuted than man is, for man has reason to guide and protect him; he can shave his head like a Chinaman, and wear a turban like a Turk; he can wash his person and protect it with insensitive clothing; his hand can reach every part of his person, and instantly avenge his insulted and his injured dignity. If he alone is the moral creature, and the responsible sinner, he has been tenderly dealt with, too tenderly for our sense of justice to be satisfied with the theory in question. We must look for some other and better reason. We have not got even an inkling of a reason in the Bridgwater Treatise of Dr. Kirby, though he was chosen by the President of the Royal Society, assisted by the Archbishop of Canterbury and the Bishop of London, as the man of all others in England best qualified to answer the question, thus implying that they themselves could not have produced it better, and that such as we have thus given it is the very apex of man wisdom, in their estimation. No wonder the world is dissatisfied of institutions articled and fettered, for they cannot easily advance beyond that of old, no new light can easily be received by them. Indeed, the Bishop of an articled institution is in office which no man of an original cloth can contentiously occupy.

To understand the reasons of respective orders of creation on this planet we begin with the largest idea – it is always most easily understood. This planet, and probably all other planets, is a mixture of good and evil in endless varieties – day and night, light and shade. To look for good only is absurd as to look for light only; but what we call evil is as good as darkness, or shade; a graduated scale of good or evil, or light and shade, in innumerable combinations, is the principle which prevails in our planet. Moreover, it is evidently part of the original plan of creation to keep each class and species of animal distinct from another, and every possible variety of means is adopted to secure this end. Species are forbidden to mix with species, and destroy by confusion the original model. Varieties are allowed; but intermixture of species is forbidden. And this is accomplished in the usual silent mode of Nature by antipathies, and by offensive weapons of every variety. If an animal of one species were not in some mode or other offensive to another species, the consequence would be a social communion of animals, in which they would all give pleasure to one another. We can very easily conceive such a state, but then it is a state that is not analogous to a planet like ours; what it may be in its regenerated state we know not, when the lion lies down with the lamb, and the child plays with the cockatrice; but before that takes but before that takes place the elements, that is the very air, and climate, and soil of the world, will be changed. We must talk of it as it is, namely, as a place in which all animated nature lives not in communion, but in disunion. And this one word explains all the phenomena of animal hostility. It is the principle of disunion developed on a graduated scale of infinite variety. The general rule it that animals are forbidden to commune, and those of peculiarly solitary habits are armed with dire instruments of offence to protect them in their privacy. They are made repulsive that they mad be let alone. The snake and the scorpion are not made for our society, nor for the society of any other animal, and they do not want it. They are therefore made powerfully repellent. An unsocial nature would otherwise be subject to rude and obtrusive aggression, which it could not tolerate. It wants a desert around it, and Nature provides it with the means of creating a desert. And were not such creatures made, the scale would be imperfect, it would want a note of the analogical gamut which expresses all the varieties of possible and legitimate modes of existence. All venomous reptiles are unsocial by nature; and when they do not mean to make a victim of an animal they avoid its company. Without this law of Nature the consequence would be that dogs, cats, mice, and rats, and creatures innumerable, would all be in league and communion, and the world would soon be overrun with them, or their powers of repulsion must be diminished; but with this law they are all separated into their respective location. The world is thus parted out amongst them instead of being held by them in common. A communion of beasts is not a very pleasant idea to man in his present state of civilisation. It is better for the present to have that prospect in future. There is no difficulty, then, in finding a reason for arming the superior animals offensively and defensively; for even their carnivorous habits of eating one another is a very single and economical mode of sculpture, without which, allowing death to exist, the world would be covered with dead carcasses.

The greatest difficulty in this question lies in the multitudinous existence of ravenous insects. The ravenous quadrupeds, the aristocracy of beasts, are comparatively few in number – modest and retiring. The lion keeps aloof from the dwellings of men, and the number of species is not incompatible with our safety and comfort. We can well afford to keep a few lions and tigers and many other ferocious beasts, so long as they keep at a respectful distance from our swelling and haunts; but those dire and omnipresent vermin, which sometimes eat up entire crops, that blight our corn, and devour or disfigure and poison our fruit, that sometimes make a nest of almost every raspberry in our garden, and whose existence is incompatible with our prosperity and comfort, present a problem which is much more difficult to solve than that of the large ferocious animals. They are certainly more like punitive creatures. But there is this objection to this view of them, that men are made conscious of their being punitive, and are never reformed in their manners by such dispensations. Moreover, it is always the poor who suffer most by them, and we cannot suppose that they can with strict justice be charged with all or with most of the sins of the nation. They may, however, be regarded as administrative. Thus, for instance, the potato blight which lately caused such ravages in Ireland, and led to the diminution of her population to the extend of nearly two millions, has proved in the end, after great suffering a fortunate circumstance. It put a stop to the further increase of Irish misery, by a very simple administrative process. A small aphis or insect was either created or multiplied indefinitely and commissioned to eat up the staple food of the poor Irish; and the English, who could not previously afford, as they thought, to do anything for Ireland, were taught by necessity to do that they would never have done voluntarily, and the Irish themselves were driven away to other lands, where food was more abundant and man more free. So that on the whole the little insect has been of service in dispersing a miserable population, and colonising the young and uncultivated regions of the earth. There is discipline seen in this, and severe discipline; and so far as I is discipline it may be regarded as containing a punitive principle. But the prevailing principle is evidently administrative, and t is probably the same species of discipline by which men in early periods of the world’s history were scattered over all the continents – dispersed in tribes, seeking food in one place because baulked in another, and eaten up by locusts and other voracious insects, which they vainly endeavoured by emigration to evade. These creatures were thus employed as whips to drive them about, and give them no rest until they had peopled the earth.

Nor was this the only service that they rendered – they taught men economy in providing for the future – in storing up more than a year’s supply – for so long as they failed to do that, they were at the mercy of the invader or a short harvest. This principle of storing is the foundation of capital, which is as indispensable as labour itself in the cultivation of the arts. The storing of grain or food was most probably the first mode of investing capital, and they who stored most could best afford to be stationary, to build houses and towns, and begin the career of civilisation; and this agrees with the facts of history, for Egypt and other flat and corn lands were amongst the first of civilised or town-living nations. Regarded in this light a blight is no longer a plague, but a lesson; and it is well known that, in proportion as human skill and industry increase, the force of these plagues perceptibly diminishes, and they are now comparatively light amongst modern civilised nations, and now the habit of storing up to the nation for the purpose of selling to another promotes and establishes the social inter-course of nations, the end and the climax of all civilisations. In all this process the noxious insects and animalcules must have been powerfully instrumental as propelling cases, and hey will gradually cease to exist in destructive numbers as they cease to be wanted. Moreover, it is very evident that in this large view of the subject, they are rather a blessing to the world than a curse. They are a curse to Individuals, tribes, and families, and perhaps to nations, but not to the race collectively, for they not only promote the colonisation of the world, but they help to lay the foundation of civilisation itself, and to restore the unity of dispersed humanity in the inter-course of nations.