Excerpt from The Practical Naturalist's Guide: Containing Instructions for Collecting, Preparing, and Preserving Zoological Specimens The poor beetle that we tread upon, In corporeal sufferance, finds a pang as great As when a giant dies. On the contrary, it is a pretty well recognised fact, that the lower the development of the nervous system, the less intense is the creature's sense of pain. Yet it is well in all cases to lean to the side of mercy; to kill only where a decided object is in view, and then in the quickest manner. Unfortunately for science, many exquisitely beauti ful animals, particularly marine, either cannot be pre served at all, or become so changed In the hands of the manipulator, that form, colour, and substance are but mockeries of the living organism; and the only way of recording its very existence is to make a good drawing of it. A naturalist with a good eye to form and colour, and possessing the power to render these on paper, is so much more a naturalist than he who cannot use his pencil. To the collector who anticipates travelling in foreign countries, the importance of cultivating the arts of pencil-drawing and water-colour painting is too great to require argument to enforce it. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.