Observations suggested by the cattle plague : about witchcraft, credulity, superstition, parliamentary reform, and other matters / by H. Strickland Constable.

  • Constable, H. Strickland (Henry Strickland), 1821-1909.
Date:
1866
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Observations suggested by the cattle plague : about witchcraft, credulity, superstition, parliamentary reform, and other matters / by H. Strickland Constable. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    man is great. Perhaps we shall hear one of these days of experiments being made by some illustrious Parisian surgeon u in corpore vili.” Perhaps we shall be hearing of a dog being shut up in a box with a table spoonful of Ganges’ mud and found dead in the morning. Logic and ingenuity will prove anything. Does a question hold out ? Double the ingenuity. Does it hold out still? Double it again, and the thing is done. Still as I say I shall not believe it. On the contrary, I believe that God is a benignant not a malignant being. I know well that the evil and misery there is in the world, from which there is no escape, must not be ignored. A blind optimism is as false and foolish as the opposite mistake. This evil and misery no doubt can never be explained. But it is only a small part of the whole. Still, though it cannot be explained, some partially ex- planatory observations can be made about it. For instance, in the animal world, almost the only natural evil is famine and its consequent diseases. But famine could only be impossible by food being so plentiful that animals would no longer have to work for their living, and the diseases consequent on this state of things would, as things are constituted, be so awful and destructive, that animal life would shortly cease to exist upon the globe. So with men, if they were not kept in some degree of order by plagues and dis- eases following- vice, dirt and indolence, the race would soon become extinct. Again, with regard to the miseries caused b}- wars