"For man's sake it should seeme that Nature made and produced all other creatures besides; though this great favour of hers, so bountifull and beneficiall in that respect, hath cost them full deere. Insomuch as it is hard to judge, whether in so doing she hath done the part of a kind mother, or a hard and cruell stepdame. For first and foremost, of all other living creatures, man she hath brought forth all naked, and cloathed him with the good and riches of others. To all the rest she hath given sufficient to clad them everie {344} one according to their kind; as namely shells, cods, hard hides, prickes, shagge, bristles, haire, downe, feathers, quils, skailes, and fleeces of wool. The verie trunkes and stemmes of trees and plants, shee hath defended with bark and rind, yea, and the same sometime double against the injuries both of heat and cold: man alone, poore wretch, she hath laid _all naked upon the bare earth, even on his birth-day, to cry and wraule presently from the very first houre that he is borne into this world_: in suche sort as, _among so many living creatures, there is none subject to shed teares and weepe like him. And verily to no babe or infant is it given once to laugh before he be fortie daies old_, and that is counted verie early and with the soonest.... The child of man thus untowardly borne, and who another day is to rule and command all other, loe how he lyeth bound hand and foot, weeping and crying, and beginning his life with miserie, as if he were to make amends and satisfaction by his punishment unto Nature, for this onely fault and trespass, that he is borne alive."--Plinie's _Naturall Historie_, by Phil. Holland, Lond. 1601, fol., intr. to b. vii. The following queries are extracted from Sir Thomas Browne's "Common-place Books," _Aristotle, Lib. Animal._: "Whether till after forty days children, though they cry, weep not; or, as Scaliger expresseth it, 'Vagiunt sed oculis siccis.' "Whether they laugh not upon tickling? "Why, though some children have been heard to cry in the womb, _yet so few cry at their birth_, though their heads be out of the womb?"--Bohn's ed. iii. 358. Thompson follows Pliny, and says that man is "taught _alone_ to weep" ("Spring," 350.); but--not to speak of the "Cruel crafty crocodile, Which, in false grief hiding his harmful guile, Doth weep full sore and sheddeth tender tears," as Spenser sings--the camel weeps when over-loaded, and the deer when chased sobs piteously. Thompson himself in a passage he has stolen from Shakspeare, makes the stag weep: ----"he stands at bay; _The big round tears_ run down his dappled face; He groans in anguish."--Autumn, 452. "Steller relates this of the _Phoca Ursina_, Pallas of the camel, and Humboldt of a small American monkey."--Laurence _On Man_, Lond. 1844, p. 161.