As to the excellency of either species, the value of things among you has ever increased with the scarcity of them, and to a million of men there is hardly one lion; besides that, in the great veneration man pretends to have for his kind, there is little sincerity farther than it concerns the share which every one's pride has in it for himself; it is a folly to boast of the tenderness shown, and attendance given to your young ones, or the excessive and lasting trouble bestowed in the education of them: Man being born the most necessitous and most helpless animal, this is only an instinct of nature, which, in all creatures, has ever proportioned the care of the parents to the wants and imbecilities of the offspring. But if a man had a real value for his kind, how is it possible that often ten thousand of them, and sometimes ten times as many, should be destroyed in few hours, for the caprice of two? All degrees of men despise those that are inferior to them, and if you could enter into the hearts of kings and princes, you would hardly find any but what have less value for the greatest part of the multitudes they rule over, than those have for the cattle that belong to them. Why should so many pretend to derive their race, though but spuriously, from the immortal gods; why should all of them suffer others to kneel down before them, and more or less take delight in having divine honours paid them, but to insinuate that themselves are of a more exalted nature, and a species superior to that of their subjects? Savage I am, but no creature can be called cruel, but what either by malice or insensibility extinguishes his natural pity: The lion was born without compassion; we follow the instinct of our nature; the gods have appointed us to live upon the waste and spoil of other animals, and as long as we can meet with dead ones, we never hunt after the living. It is only man, mischievous man, that can make death a sport. Nature taught your stomach to crave nothing but vegetables; but your violent fondness to change, and great eagerness after novelties, have prompted you to the destruction of animals without justice or necessity, perverted your nature, and warped your appetites which way soever your pride or luxury have called them. The lion has a ferment within him that consumes the toughest skin and hardest bones, as well as the flesh of all animals without exception: Your squeamish stomach, in which the digestive heat is weak and inconsiderable, will not so much as admit of the most tender parts of them, unless above half the concoction has been performed by artificial fire before hand; and yet what animal have you spared to satisfy the caprices of a languid appetite? Languid I say; for what is man's hunger, if compared to the lion's? Yours, when it is at the worst, makes you faint, mine makes me mad: Oft have I tried with roots and herbs to allay the violence of it, but in vain; nothing but large quantities of flesh can anywise appease it.