I have seen many boys who shuddered, at first, at the thought of taking the life, even of a snake, until compelled to it by what they conceived to be duty; and who shuddered still more at taking the life of a lamb, a calf, a pig, or a fowl. And yet I have seen these same boys, in subsequent life, become so changed, that they could look on such scenes not merely with indifference, but with gratification. Is this change of feeling desirable? How long is it after we begin to look with indifference on pain and suffering in brutes, before we begin to be less affected than before by human suffering? I am not ignorant that sentiments like these are either regarded as morbid, and therefore pitiable, or as affected, and therefore ridiculous. Who that has read the story of Anthony Benezet, as related by Dr. Rush, has not smiled at what he must have regarded a feeling wholly misplaced, if nothing more? And yet it was a feeling which I think is very far from deserving ridicule, however homely the manner of expressing it. But I have related this interesting story in another part of the work. I am not prepared to maintain, strongly, the old-fashioned doctrine, that a butcher who commences his employment at adult age, is necessarily rendered hardhearted or unfeeling; or, that they who eat flesh have their sensibilities deadened, and their passions inflamed by it--though I am not sure that there is not some truth in it. I only maintain, that to render children familiar with the taking away of animal life,--especially the lives of our own domestic animals, often endeared to us by many interesting circumstances of their history, or of our own, in relation to them,--cannot be otherwise than unhappy in its tendency. How shocking it must be to the inhabitants of Jupiter, or some other planet, who had never before witnessed these sad effects of the ingress of sin among us, to see the carcasses of animals, either whole or by piece-meal, hoisted upon our very tables before the faces of children of all ages, from the infant at the breast, to the child of ten or twelve, or fourteen, and carved, and swallowed; and this not merely once, but from day to day, through life! What could they--what would they--expect from such an education of the young mind and heart? What, indeed, but mourning, desolation, and woe! On this subject the First Annual Report of the American Physiological Society thus remarks--and I wish the remark might have its due weight on the mind of the reader: