Who has not seen numerous instances of the delight with which advantage is taken of weakness or simplicity, to practise upon them some sly mischief, or inflict some open mortification; and of the unrepressed glee with which the rude spectators can witness or abet the malice? And if, in such a case, an indignant observer has hazarded a remark or expostulation, the full stare, and the quickly succeeding laugh and retort of brutal scorn, have thrown open to his revolting sight the state of the recess within, where the moral sentiments are; and shown how much the perceptions and notions had been indebted to the cares of the instructor. Could he help thinking what was deserved somewhere, by individuals or by the local community collectively, for suffering a being to grow up to quite or nearly the complete dimensions and features of manhood, with so vile a thing within it in substitution for what a soul should be? We need not remark, what every one has noticed, how much the vulgar are amused by seeing vexatious or injurious incidents, (if only not quite disastrous or tragical,) befalling persons against whom they can have no resentment; how ferocious often their temper and means of revenge when they _have_ causes of resentment; or how intensely delighted, (in company, it is true, with many that are called their betters,) in beholding several of their fellow-mortals, whether in anger or athletic competition, covering each other with bruises, deformity, and blood. Our institutions, however, protect, in some considerable degree, man against man, as being framed in a knowledge of what would else become of the community. But observe a moment what are the dispositions of the vulgar as indulged, and with no preventive interference of those institutions, on the inferior animals. To a large proportion of this class it is, in their youth, one of the most vivid exhilarations to witness the terrors and anguish of living beings. In many parts of the country it would be no improbable conjecture in explanation of a savage yell heard at a distance, that a company of rationals may be witnessing the writhings, agonies, and cries, of some animal struggling for escape or for life, while it is suffering the infliction, perhaps, of stones, and kicks, or wounds by more directly fatal means of violence. If you hear in the clamor a sudden burst of fiercer exultation, you may surmise that just then a deadly blow has been given. There is hardly an animal on the whole face of the country, of size enough, and enough within reach to be a marked object of attention, that would not be persecuted to death if no consideration of ownership interposed. The children of the uncultivated families are allowed, without a check, to exercise and improve the hateful disposition, on flies, young birds, and other feeble and harmless creatures; and they are actually encouraged to do it on what, under the denomination of vermin, are represented in the formal character of enemies, almost in such