through a straight tube, and making its confines the final limit of our judgment. Why should not some animals be created for wretchedness, since in the human species the greatest number are devoted to pain and misery from their birth? Certainly, evil is more our own production than that of Nature. For one man who is unhappy from being born weak and deformed, thousands are rendered so by the oppression and cruelty of their fellow-creatures. Animals are, in general, more happy, because each species has nothing to dread from their individuals; to them there is but one source of evil, but to the human species there are two. Moral evil, which he has produced himself, is a torrent which is increased into a sea, whose inundation covers and afflicts the whole face of the earth. Physical evil, on the contrary, is confined to very narrow limits; it seldom appears alone or unaccompanied with an equal if not a superior good. Can animals be denied happiness when they enjoy freedom, and have the faculty of easily procuring subsistence, when they are less subject to ill health, and possess the necessary or relative organs of pleasure in a more eminent degree than the human species? In these respects animals in general are very richly endowed; and the degraded species of the sloths are, perhaps, the only creatures to whom Nature has been unkind, and the only ones which present us the image of innate misery and wretchedness. Let us now inspect their condition more closely; being unfurnished with teeth they cannot seize upon prey, nor feed upon flesh or vegetables; reduced to live on leaves and wild fruits, they consume much time in crawling to a tree, and still more in climbing up to the branches; and during this slow and painful labour, which sometimes lasts many days, they are obliged to support the most pressing hunger. When they have accomplished their end they cling to the tree, crawl from branch to branch, and, by degrees, strip every twig of its leaves. In this situation they remain several weeks without any liquid; and when they have consumed the store, and the tree is entirely naked, they still continue, unable to descend until the pressure of hunger becomes more powerful than the fear of danger or death, and they suffer themselves to fall to the ground like an inanimate mass, without being capable of exerting any effort to break the violence of the fall.