Page:Notes and Queries - Series 12 - Volume 1.djvu/183

 128. 1. FEB. 26, 1916. J

NOTES AND QUERIES.

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CRUELTY TO ANIMALS (12 S. i. 69). The following quotations afford some illustration of the attitude of the Church in England towards this question. In ' L'eglise et la pitie envers les aiiimaux ' (Lecoffre, 1903) " a book of seventy witnesses to the fact that mercy to animals has been and is* inculcated in the Church from the fourth century to the present '* at p. 25 De Sancto Anselmo archiepiscopo Cantuarensi in Anglia ('Vita' auctore Eadmero, monacho Cantuarensi) we read :

" Discendente autem Anselmo a curia, et ad villain sua,m nomine Heysem properante, pueri, quos nutriebat. leporem sibi occursantem in via canibus insecuti sunt, et fugitantem infra pedes equi, quern Pater ipse insedebat, subsidentem consecuti sunt. Ille seiens, miseram bestiam sibi sub se refugio consuluisse,retentishabenis,equum loco fixit, nee cupitum bestiae voluit presidium denegare ; quam canes circumdantes, et baud grato obsequio hinc inde lingentes, nee de sub cquo poterant ejieere, nee in aliquo laedere. Quod videntes, admirati sumus. At Anselnius, ubi quosdam ex equitibus adspexit ridere, et quasi

Ero capta bestia laetitiae fraena laxare, solutus in icrymas, ait : Ridetis ? Et utique infelici huic nullus risus, lastitia nulla est. . . . Quibus dictis, laxato fraeno, in iter rediit, bestiam ultra per- sequi clara voce canibus interdicens. Tune ilia ab omni Isesione immunis, exultans praepeti cursu, campos silvasque revisit ....

" Alia vice conspexit puerum cum avicula in via ludentem. Quae avis pedem filp innexum habens, saepe, cum laxius ire permittebatur, fuga sibi consulere cupiens, avolare nitebatur. At puer filum manu tenens, retractam usque ad se dejiciebat : et hoc ingens gaudium illi erat. Factum est id frequentius. Quod Pater aspiciens, miser condoluit. avi, ac ut rupto filo libertati redderetur, optavit. Et ecce filum rumpitur, avis avolat, puer plorat, Pater exultat. ..."

In the centuries following, St. Thomas, king of thought then in England too, taught (ibid., p. 33) :

" Potest in homine consurgere misericord ise affectus etiam circa afflictiones animalium . . . . Et ideo, ut Dominus populum judaicum ad crudeli- tatem pronum, ad misericordiam revocaret, voluit eos exercere ad misericordiam etiam circa bruta animalia."

The teaching works out in the wish, at least, of even the un-" humanitarian " Cardinal Newman :

" Gain me the grace to love all Grod's works for God's sake .... Let me never forget that the same God who made me made the whole world, and all the men and animals that live in it."

His brother Cardinal, Donriet, Archbishop of Bordeaux, came down to a rule :

" Every animal should have the distance measured which it has to go ; the burdens it has to bear should not exceed a certain weight ; it is fit for work only a certain number of hours in the day and of days in the w'eek. It is the universal law, the divine dispensation. It can- never be transgressed with impunity."

But, because Belgian Catholics sometimes do transgress the law, the late Ouida ( : A Dog in Flanders,' p. 16) taught that there is no law :

" He [Patrasche, the dog] had been fed on curses and baptized with blob's. Why not ? It was a Christian country, and Patrasche was but a dog. . . .To deal the tortures of hell on the animal creation is a way which the Christians have of showing their belief in it."

See also the English adaptation of the French work, * The Church and Kindness to Animals ' (Bums & Gates, 1906).

W. F. P. STOCKLEY.

University College, Cork.

MEMORY AT THE MOMENT OF DEATH (12 S. i. 49, 97). This is surely the most con- spicuous case known of the persistence of a transparent fallacy. Nothing, of course, is more certain than that memory is particu- larly busy upon the near approach of dis- solution ; and that no form of dissolution better serves for this than the last few struggling gaspings of the drowning is equally obvious, too, but the popular conception does not at all stop at this far from it.

The current delusion is that death by drowning has in it something apart in kind, not merely from death in any other form, but even from suffocation by any other medium, an idea not remotely connected, probably, with the aspect of water as the sacred element in baptism and spiritual life, proving thus, as it were, the element of death. I do not think the popular mind on the matter w T ould accept as possible this lively last picture of the past if drowning occurred in some other way as with Clarence in his Malmsey butt, for instance. It must be drowning by water.

I was " drowned " myself in an Irish lake exactly well, no matter how long ago, but I was just 15 at the time. I and my victim, a lad of my own age, to whom I was giving a swimming lesson in ten feet of water, were dragged out by two boatmen and laid side by side on the grass just in the nick of time. We came to almost at once, dressed, and got back to school before " the bell," feeling nothing the worse for the adventure. There was no revival of the past in all the frightfully distressing experience, none what- ever ; and I venture to think my time of life was the very best that could be chosen for the experiment. If there were the slightest physical or psychical basis for the belief, I was perfectly old enough to have had a glimpse at least of the supposed vision could not, in fact, have possibly escaped it.