WE NEED ANOTHER AND  

             A WISER AND PERHAPS

                  A MORE MYSTICAL

              CONCEPT OF ANIMALS.  

Remote from universal nature, and living by

complicated artifice, man in civilization surveys

the creature through the glass of his knowledge

and sees thereby a feather magnified and

the whole image in distortion. We patronize

them for their incompleteness, for their tragic fate

of having taken form so far below ourselves.

And therein we err, and greatly err. For the animal

shall not be measured by man. In a world older

and more complete than ours they move finished

and complete, gifted with extensions of the

senses we have lost or never attained, living

by  voices we shall never hear. They are not

brethren, they are not underlings; they are

other nations, caught with ourselves in the net of

life and time, fellow prisoners

of the splendour and travail of the earth. 

From the Outermost House by Henry Beston.

Copyyright, 1928, by Doubleday, Doran & Company, Inc. Garden City, New York