Page:Essays and phantasies by James Thomson.djvu/72

60 ulcers of geysers and volcanos. Her axis has been shamefully jarred from rectitude; and her land and water are so unequally and irregularly arranged that she looks altogether lop-sided. Heat and light, with all things flowing from them, are very unfairly distributed over her body, and therefore among us who live upon her body. For such light and heat as she gets, she has to keep whirling and spinning round the sun in the most undignified and wearisome manner. The animals she brings forth (not to speak of the plants and the minerals) are in many cases ugly, unamiable, ferocious, and tormented with monstrous appetites, which can only be satisfied by devouring their fellow-creatures; nearly all of them are quite selfish and immoral; and the few of them that are philanthropic (such as surly old lions, tigers, wolves, sharks, vultures and other sweet carrion fowl; all genuine lovers of man) are almost as disagreeably so as our human philanthropists themselves. She has no moral character at all, and her moods are most capricious and violent. In her dealings with man she is seldom fair, and the unfairness is nearly always against man: thus she hardly ever grants him what he has not worked for, while she very often withholds from him what he has worked for. The ignorant creature knows nothing of the wise doctrines of Malthus, but spawns forth as many children of all sorts as ever she can, without the least prudential restraint. She has consequently far more than she can properly feed and rear; so that a large part perishes in infancy (and we are told that none of these except the human sucklings will rise to another life; poor bereaved monkey and donkey mothers, for instance, being altogether without the precious consolations of immortality); a considerable part is eaten up by mankind and other hungry animals, and the remainder can seldom get food enough. And with regard to man in particular; as the human race grows ever more numerous,