thoughtless hearer to act upon the very questionable belief, as they say even the amiable enthusiasts of Port Royal acted upon the doctrine that animals were mere unconscious automata, by pushing their theory to the too practical length of active cruelty. Let us at least give the slugs and beetles the benefit of the doubt. People often say that science makes men unfeeling: for my own part, I fancy it makes them only the more humane, since they are the better able dimly to figure to themselves the pleasures and pains of humbler beings as they really are. The man of science perhaps realises more vividly than all other men the inner life and vague rights even of crawling worms and ugly earwigs. I will take up this poor slug whose mishap has set me preaching, and put him out of his misery at once, if misery it be. My hoe has cut through the soft flesh of the mantle and hit against the little embedded shell. Very few people know that a slug has a shell, but it has, though quite hidden from view; at least, in this yellow kind--for there are other sorts which have got rid of it altogether. I am not sure that I have wounded the poor thing very seriously; for the shell protects the heart and vital organs, and the hoe has glanced off on striking it, so that the mantle alone is injured, and that by no means irrecoverably. Snail flesh heals fast, and on the whole I shall be justified, I think, in letting him go. But it is a very curious thing that this slug should have a shell at all! Of course it is by descent a snail, and, indeed, there are very few differences between the two races except in the presence or absence of a house. You may trace a curiously complete set of gradations between the perfect snail and the perfect slug in this respect; for all the intermediate forms still survive with only an almost imperceptible gap between each species and the next. Some kinds, like the common brown garden snail, have comparatively small bodies and big shells, so that they can retire comfortably within them when attacked; and if they only had a lid or door to their houses they could shut themselves up hermetically, as periwinkles and similar mollusks actually do. Other kinds, like the pretty golden amber-snails which frequent marshy places, have a body much too big for its house, so that they cannot possibly retire within their shells completely. Then come a number of intermediate species, each with progressively smaller and thinner shells, till at length we reach the testacella, which has only a sort of limpet-shaped shield on his tail, so that he is generally recognised as being the first of the slugs rather than the last of the snails. You will not find a testacella unless you particularly look for him, for he seldom comes above ground, being a most bloodthirsty subterraneous carnivore who follows the burrows of earthworms as savagely as a ferret tracks those of rabbits; but in all the southern and western counties you may light