AND ON THE MEANS OF IMPROVING THE SAME;

WITH NUMEROUS ANECDOTES AND ILLUSTRATIVE NOTES.

ADDRESSED TO

LEWIS GOMPERTZ, ESQ.,

PRESIDENT OF THE ANIMALS FRIEND SOCIETY.

BY T. FORSTER, M.B., F.R.A.S., F.L.S.,

HON. MEMB. OF THE PHRENOLOGICAL SOCIETY AND CORR. MEMB. OF

THE ACADEMY OF NATUR

CIENCES HIL DEPHIA, ETC., ETC., ETC.

Brussel 8281

PRINTED BY DELTOMBE AND CO.,

FOR W. TODD, Montagne de la Cour.

1839.

INTRODUCTORY LETTER

то LEWIS

GOMPERTZ, ESQ.,

PRESIDENT OF THE ANIMALS FRIEND SOCIETY.

SOME benevolent persons, during my recent visit to England, requested me to write a pamphlet on the subject of Cruelty to Animals, and on the best mode of bettering their condition, previous to the communications which I have since had with your Society on the subject. I at first refused this task, not from any unwillingness to contribute to the accomplishment of so kind an object, but from the consciousness of my own inability to do it justice. Accustomed, during the greatest portion of my life, to the less useful employment of pursuing the physical Sciences, and illustrating the operations of Nature in detail, I felt that I had not had time to reflect sufficiently on the vast moral historical and even metaphysical questions which the considerations of the animal kingdom involved, to be able to place the best means of improving its condition before the public, in that comprehensive point of view which alone could add any new force to arguments already urged, with too little avail, by previous writers. My diffidence was also founded on another consideration: I saw that it would be necessary, writing, as I must do, for a large portion of readers who were accustomed to rely more on authority than on their own reason for arguments, to have recourse to some critical enquiries for which the nature of my studies had not in any

fitted me. way I had hitherto examined Nature in her exterior beauties but it would now be necessary to investigate her in some of her worst deformities, and to trace to their source, with a view of reforming them, many of the most appalling of human crimes, which, having sprung from habitual cruelty towards animals, had been consummated in the most revolting enormities committed against man. The notorious monster, for example, who many years ago was brought to condign punishment for indulging in a propensity to assassinate women in the dark, had confessed that he owed this demoniacal pleasure to having been allowed, when a boy, to frequent the slaughter house. Nero and Caligula are believed to have begun their career of bloodshed by killing flies and history records in every age and country that animals, because less protected by the law, have afforded to cowardly and cruel men the earliest means of indulging those vicious propensities of human nature which, strengthened by habit, have ended in tyranny and murder. Several persons of both sexes convicted of wanton cruelty had confessed, before their execution, that they had begun their career of wickedness by tormenting animals. Phrenology, too, had opened to me a vast field of inquiry into the physical conditions of character; in confirmation of the new doctrine, hundreds of the most atrocious cases had been brought before Gall, Spurzheim, and myself, of persons who had made similar confessions. The subject therefore seemed to demand an extensive investigation into the laws of cerebral physiology, for which I was unprepared. In addition to this, religious doctrines. are everywhere, but particularly in Europe, mixed up with all moral lessons; and for these I was still less qualified. Nor was I wholly without apprehension, having been, at one period, rather too fond of joining Diana in her sylvan sports not entirely destitute of cruelty, that I might be accused of wearing the mask of hypocrisy, and suspected of an illtimed and doubtful conversion, in preaching one thing after having long practised another; and that, if I made such a venturesome attack on the Diva Triformis, as would be necessary in this treatise; though