How much is there in the actions of persons much lowlier than Newton which to the most intelligent of animals, dogs, elephants, or monkeys, could they speculate at all, must seem wholly devoid of sense;--as for instance that men should spend such continual labour in digging and ploughing. So again, in his famous lecture on Coal, Professor Huxley depicts what might have been the reflections of a giant reptile of the Carboniferous Epoch, suggested by the seemingly senseless waste of nature's powers in the production of the primeval forests, that have furnished the coal measures, to which so much of our progress and civilization is directly due. And, after all, given the universal law of death for all living things, it would hardly appear that we can assure ourselves that any attendant circumstance constitutes a greater evil--as Mr. Darwin's argument seems to assume; and yet, it does not appear ever to have been argued that there can be no purpose in Nature since no organic life endures for ever. Most probably, if we knew enough, we should plainly see that nothing could be more cruel than to have omitted the carnivora from creation, leaving herbivorous animals to multiply till they starved one another to death, or at least to perish of senile decay far more painfully than under the fangs of tigers and wolves. Instances might moreover be quoted which serve to remind us how impossible it is rightly to estimate the true character of suffering amongst creatures altogether different from ourselves. Thus when, as eye-witnesses report, young scorpions clinging to their mother devour her alive, scientifically avoiding as long as possible all vital parts and mortal wounds--we are inclined to consider them monsters of wickedness, and their parent as a model of motherly devotion, whose sufferings cannot be less horrible than those of a caterpillar similarly eaten by the ichneumon grub. But we cannot with any reason impute more moral blame to the young scorpions, than to the lambkins which draw sustenance from their dams in another fashion which we find touching and poetical; while as for the mother--who doubtless treated her own parent in just the same fashion--she exhibits no symptom to show that she resents her offsprings' advances, any more than does the ewe, but on the contrary has her sting ever ready for any one who would interfere with them.