Daily Inspiration Quote by Henry Walter Bates

The line reads like a small domestic miracle staged in the rough-and-tumble theater of the jungle: animals sharing food without the petty dramas humans expect from them. Bates builds its force by slipping in a quietly loaded aside - "when the friendship of animals is put to a hard test" - as if he’s reporting on a social experiment rather than a meal. The phrasing invites you to notice not just behavior, but character, and then to feel the shock of its steadiness: "they never quarrelled."

That "remarked" matters. Bates positions the scene as communal knowledge, something observed and repeated, not a single sentimental anecdote. It’s field-naturalist credibility doing rhetorical work, giving the moment the sheen of evidence while still letting it function as parable. The "favourite fruit" is also a cunning choice: not survival rations, but desire. He’s testing them where moralists always test humans - in the realm of preference and pleasure - and the animals pass.

Subtextually, Bates is smuggling in a critique of human social myths. Victorian readers were steeped in ideas about nature as relentlessly competitive, a hierarchy of tooth and claw that conveniently mirrored empire and class. Bates doesn’t deny struggle, but he complicates it with cooperation and restraint. The intent isn’t to humanize animals so much as to de-center the human: if creatures we presume "lower" can manage fairness under temptation, what excuse does civilization have for its endless squabbles over its own favorite fruits?