man. Mr Pennant calmly describes this more than savage custom, as follows. "The geese are plucked fire times in the year: the first plucking is at Lady-day, for feathers and quills; and the same is renewed, for feathers only, four times more between that and Michaelmas. The old geese submit quietly, to the operation, but the young ones are very noisy and unruly. I once saw this performed, and observed that goslings of six weeks old were not spared; for their tails were plucked, as I was told, to habituate them early to what they were to come to. If the season prove cold, numbers of the geese die by this barbarous custom."
Entomology. The Entomologist or Collector of Insects, practises the most unrelenting cruelties on flies, moths and spiders. The papilionaceous race are impaled for days and weeks on corking pins. The libellutæ, or dragon-flies, are killed by squeezing the thorax, or with the spirit of turpentine.
Naturalists, of some feeling, find it difficult to kill the largest kinds of Moths and Sphinxes. The corking pin, on which they are impaled, is usually dipped in aquafortis, pierced through the body, then with, drawn and a drop of the aquafortis put into the wound. Should this prove insufficient, the point of the pin is put through a card and held in the flame of a candle till it be red hot. Fumigations of sulphur are said to destroy the beauty of the insect; and do not always succeed; not even when exposed under a glass with burning sulphur for half an hour. The Libellutæ tribe are destroyed by a red hot wire "being run up the body and thorax.—Donovan on the Management of Insects.
Science may certainly be improved, and learning increased without the practice of such barbarities.
