“Our advance in synthetic chemistry has enabled us to imitate nature’s products in many of their organic forms. Besides those nitrogen compounds which we manufacture as life sustainers, we produce many substances which are equivalent to those you obtain exclusively from animal and vegetable life. We obtain in this way substitutes for leather, horn, ivory, and also fats and oils, albumen, gluten, starch, etc., etc.; most of these better and in more convenient forms for industrial and culinary uses than nature furnishes them. Our textile fabrics are entirely derived from vegetable growth, and we give them a quality of slow or quick conduction of heat to accord with their purposes of summer or winter wear. “You may safely infer from what I have said that we slaughter no animals for food or raiment. Such demoralizing cruelty we have never practiced. The ferocious examples of beasts and birds of prey we have never known, and we have no extensive wastes over which they could live and flourish. Our animals which are limited in variety compared with yours are all domesticated, and our treatment of them is so uniformly kind, that instead of avoiding us they court our society. We have a clean and beautiful creature, much smaller than your cow, which gives us milk. It is remarkably intelligent, and is often admitted into our households to nurse our infants, who become very fond of them. Our city parks are provided with these animals and it is a common sight to see them gamboling with children and quietly submitting themselves to their nourishment. “It is a part of our religion to believe that every living creature is related, though distantly, to ourselves, and to those of them especially which are brought into our service, we owe not only an obligation of kindness, but the care of attention in sickness and old age. We have accordingly established places of retirement for them. The kind relations existing for ages between us and all animal kind has modified their conduct to us in a way that would be striking to you, and would lead you to believe that they possess more intelligence than you have given them credit for. They come to us in their troubles, and submit in the most human way to medical treatment in their hospitals. You would be interested to note the friendly familiarity existing between us and our birds, who in brilliancy of plumage and song are far ahead of yours. They abound in our city parks, and one has only to open the window and whistle and they will come flying into the apartment, engaging themselves in a concert of song, perched about on the furniture, as a happy privilege. On any other occasion when one comes silent and alone we know what it portends, and it is tenderly carried to the bird hospital.” “You have,” I ventured to enquire, “railroads and boats for transportation?”