To strengthen this argument still further, comparative anatomy testifies that large classes of animals have a structure evidently intended to enable them to feed on other tribes. The teeth of the more perfect carnivorous animals are adapted for seizing and tearing their prey, while those which feed on vegetables have cutting and grinding teeth, but not the canine. So the whole digestive apparatus in the carnivora is more simple, and of less extent, than in the herbivorous tribes, while in the former the gastric juice acts more readily upon flesh, and in the latter upon vegetables. The muscular apparatus, also, is developed in greater power in the former than in the latter, especially in the neck and fore paw. Throughout all the classes of animals, those which feed on flesh are armed with poisonous fangs, or talons, or beaks, or other formidable weapons, while the vegetable feeders are usually in a great measure defenceless. In short, in the one class we find a perfect adaptation, in all the organs, for destroying, digesting, and assimilating other animals, and in the other class, an arrangement, equally obvious, for procuring and digesting vegetables. Indeed, you need only show the anatomist the skeleton, or even a very small part of the skeleton, of an unknown animal, to enable him, in most cases, to decide, what is the food of that animal, with almost as much certainty as if he had for years observed its habits. Who can doubt, then, that when a carnivorous animal employs the weapons with which nature has furnished it for the destruction of another animal, in order to satisfy its hunger, that it acts in obedience to a law of its being, originally impressed upon its constitution by the Creator? It is true, that even the flesh-eating animals may be taught for a time to subsist upon vegetable products. But this is unnatural; and such an animal usually pays the price of thus inverting its original instinct, by disease and premature decay. In a state of nature, an animal would starve rather than thus violate its instinctive desires.
I will allude to only one other fact, that shows death to be inseparable from organized beings, without a constant miraculous interference, in such a world as ours. Animal organization, in all conceivable circumstances, must be liable to accident, from mere mechanical force, by which life would be destroyed. It may be possible, perhaps, to conceive of a material tenement for the soul, which should be unaffected by all forms of mechanical violence and chemical action; if, for instance, its constitution were analogous to that supposed medium through which light, heat, and electricity, and perhaps gravitation, act. But, surely, our present bodies are far enough removed from such conditions, being of all terrestrial things the most liable to ruin from the causes above mentioned.