Nature is always acting like that.  Mrs. X. said (of course) that the caterpillar was not conscious and didn’t suffer.  She should have known better.  No caterpillar can deceive Nature.  If this one couldn’t suffer, Nature would have known it and would have hunted up another caterpillar.  Not that she would have let this one go, merely because it was defective.  No.  She would have waited and let him turn into a night-moth; and then fried him in the candle.

Nature cakes a fish’s eyes over with parasites, so that it shan’t be able to avoid its enemies or find its food.  She sends parasites into a star-fish’s system, which clog up its prongs and swell them and make them so uncomfortable that the poor creature delivers itself from the prong to ease its misery; and presently it has to part with another prong for the sake of comfort, and finally with a third.  If it re-grows the prongs, the parasite returns and the same thing is repeated.  And finally, when the ability to reproduce prongs is lost through age, that poor old star-fish can’t get around any more, and so it dies of starvation.

In Australia is prevalent a horrible disease due to an “unperfected tapeworm.”  Unperfected—­that is what they call it, I do not know why, for it transacts business just as well as if it were finished and frescoed and gilded, and all that.

November 9.  To the museum and public picture gallery with the president of the Society of Artists.  Some fine pictures there, lent by the S. of A. several of them they bought, the others came to them by gift.  Next, to the gallery of the S. of A.—­annual exhibition—­just opened.  Fine.  Think of a town like this having two such collections as this, and a Society of Artists.  It is so all over Australasia.  If it were a monarchy one might understand it.  I mean an absolute monarchy, where it isn’t necessary to vote money, but take it.  Then art flourishes.  But these colonies are republics—­republics with a wide suffrage; voters of both sexes, this one of New Zealand.  In republics, neither the government nor the rich private citizen is much given to propagating art.  All over Australasia pictures by famous European artists are bought for the public galleries by the State and by societies of citizens.  Living citizens—­not dead ones.  They rob themselves to give, not their heirs.  This S. of A. here owns its buildings built it by subscription.

CHAPTER XXXI.

The spirit of wrath—­not the words—­is the sin; and the spirit of wrath is cursing.  We begin to swear before we can talk. 
                                  —­Pudd’nhead Wilson’s New Calendar.