"Who then will establish the difference between the flames which glowed within us two? "No! We who exchange those glances are not animal and man. "Created alike are the two pairs of eyes that are fixed on each other. “And each of these eye-pairs, that of the man as well as that of the animal, expresses clearly and distinctly _an anxious craving for mutual caresses_.” It is a vicious trait of the human character that it soon grows callous to caresses, and that the unmasked expression of tender emotion is regarded as undignified and in “bad form.” It is the absence in the dog’s mind of this ugly human trait that makes him such a delightful friend and companion. However much you caress and fondle him, he will always be anxious and grateful for the next gentle pat on the head, the next kind look, and will never despise you for any excess of fond emotion lavished on him. The greatest flaw in Christian ethics is, that it takes so little account of this capacity of animals for affection, and our duties towards them. The duty of kindness towards animals is indeed, as Mr. Lecky remarks, “the one form of humanity which appears more prominently in the Old Testament than in the New.” “Thou shalt not muzzle the mouth of the ox that treadeth out the corn,” is a precept which deprecates even a very modified form of cruelty to animals. Had this precept been given in a more generalised and comprehensive form, what an incalculable amount of suffering might have been saved the animals that had the misfortune to be born in Christian countries, as compared with those in the Oriental countries. According to Mr. Lecky, Plutarch was the first writer who placed the duty of kindness to animals on purely moral grounds; “and he urges that duty with an emphasis and detail to which no adequate parallel can, I believe, be found in the Christian writings for at least 1700 years.” Some of the earlier Greek philosophers had based this duty on the doctrine of the transmigration of human souls into animal bodies; and it is related that Pythagoras used to buy of fishermen the whole contents of their nets, for the pleasure of letting the fish go again. Leonardo da Vinci, from less superstitious motives, used to buy caged birds for the same purpose; and similar traits are told of other men of genius who were sufficiently refined to recognise the evidences of emotion in animals. In our times, finally, we have a man, Mr. Bergh, who devotes his whole life to the object of establishing the personal rights of animals to kind treatment on legal grounds.