Every observer of children must, I think, have noticed that much cruelty is committed by them from the merest thoughtlessness. It would be, perhaps, not easy to define very philosophically, or with anything like psychological accuracy, how it is that children so often act with cruelty to the world of life around them. The poor crushed fly, the wretched, pelted kitten, the tortured cockchafer—all rise familiarly enough to our memories as instances of the unthinking wantonness, this early and miserable misuse of our mysteriously-given lordship over the creatures around us. These things, however (account for them as we may), most certainly exist, and most certainly lead onward to cruelty more or less deliberate in after life. Wantonness in the child, if unchecked, is sure to deepen into cruelty, or, at any rate, indifference to it, in the youth and in the man. If this is true, however, on the one hand, it is as certainly true on the other that few things can be taught more easily or learned more readily than tenderness and mercy to the animal world, if the teaching begins early enough and is conducted in the right way. Give a child a little insight into the characteristics of some of the members of that varied though lowly domain of creation which is most immediately at the mercy of childish cruelty, bring out the conception of each poor fluttering or crawling thing being an individual, and having its own individual sufferings, and often showing its own pity moving apprehensions, and children, even at a very early age, will show in return an interested tenderness, and consistently maintain it as they grow up.