This essay was given to me by a Macintosh Computer Sudent from Brookhaven Community College, ...
Over 80 years old, she and her husband were taking my class together. I cherish this gift and want to share it with you.
It's quite profound and beautiful.

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,
of 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,gifted wiith extensions of the senses we have
lost or never attained. Living by voices we shall never hear. They are not
brethern, they are not underlings, they are other nations caught with
ourselves in the net of life and time, fellow prisoners in the splendour and travail of the earth.

Henry Beston, The Outermost House, 1928