CHAMBERS'S JOURNAL
OF
POPULAR
LITERATURE, SCIENCE, AND ART.
CONTENTS
TREATMENT OF ANIMALS.
FROM DAWN TO SUNSET.
A TYROLESE CATASTROPHE.
SINGING AND TALKING BY TELEGRAPH.
'HELEN'S BABIES' AND 'OTHER PEOPLE'S CHILDREN.'
TEA-CULTURE IN INDIA.
PROFESSOR TYNDALL ON THE SPREAD OF DISEASE.
| No. 714. | SATURDAY, SEPTEMBER 1, 1877. | Price 1½d. |
TREATMENT OF ANIMALS.
In our youthful days in the early years of thepresent century, little consideration was given toa systematic kindness to animals. Horses wereoverwrought without mercy, when ill-fed and withwounds which should have excited compassion.If they sunk down in their misery, they were leftto die, the chances being that, in their last hours,they were inhumanly pelted with stones by boys;—noone, not even magistrates or clergymen, givingany concern to the cruelties that were perpetrated.All that we have seen, without exciting a word ofremonstrance. A wretch who habitually turnedout his old, overwrought, and half-starved horsesto die on the town-green, never incurred any checkor reprobation. His proceedings were viewed withperfect indifference. People, while passing alongin a demure sort of way to church, would see acrowd of boys pitching stones into the wounds ofa dying horse, and not one of these decorouschurch-goers endeavoured to stop these horridacts of inhumanity. Like the Pharisees of old,they passed on the other side. Such withinrecollection is a small sample of the uncheckedatrocities of our young days. Cats were peltedto death. Birds' nests were robbed. Dogs hadkettles tied to their tail, and were hounded tomadness by howling multitudes. Oxen wereoverdriven to an infuriated condition, and theirfrantic and revengeful career formed an acceptablesubject of public amusement.
Barbarous in a certain sense as these comparativelyrecent times were, there had already beenshewn instances of a kind consideration for animals.The poet Cowper, it will be recollected,wrote touchingly of the hares which he haddomesticated. Sir Walter Scott's tender regardfor his dogs has been recently noticed in thesepages. There was here and there a glimmeringconsciousness that animals had some sort ofclaims on the mercy of mankind. What strikesone as curious is that society had retrogradedin this respect. The oldest laws in the world,found in the early books of the Old Testament,enjoin a kind treatment of animals. If we see anass fall which belongs t