126 POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



SPECIAL BOOKS. 



The vivisection question has not yet created nearly as much stir in 

 America as it has in England, where it has long been a rival of the Deceased 

 Wife's Sister controversy as a provoker of agitation and rhetorical dis- 

 charges. It has, however, recently come into view here through an at- 

 tempt to induce Congress to pass a bill imposing severe restrictions on 

 vivisection in the District of Columbia. For the reason above stated Eng- 

 land is our chief source of literature on the subject, and in a little book by 

 Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson* which comes opportunely to hand, we 

 have a calm and philosophical examination of the main question at issue. 

 Each of Sir Benjamin's chapters is a reply to one of nine questions sub- 

 mitted to him from the Leigh-Brown Trust, which holds an endowment for 

 a biological institution from which painful experiments are to be excluded, 

 hence the scope of the book is somewhat limited. The first question pro- 

 pounded to him is, " In view of the diflPerence of organization between man 

 and the lower animals, do you consider that painful experiment has played 

 any indispensable part in the study of medical substances and methods for 

 the cxu'e of disease ? " He answers this in the negative ; " because," he says, 

 " if what has seemed to be indispensable had never been thought of, some 

 other plan equally good would or might have led to the same results." 

 Yet he holds that every experiment hitherto performed for the prevention 

 or cure of such a disease as cancer has been justifiable. Hence his com- 

 plete answer is, briefly, "Experiment may be expedient, it is not indis- 

 pensable." The second question asks about anaesthesia in particular the 

 same that the first does about all medical substances. Sir Benjamin 

 answers with an unqualified negative ; but as he has made a special study 

 of anajsthetics, having tested so many as twenty-nine, he goes on to give a 

 brief history of anaesthesia and then to point out some still unfilled wants 

 in this field. In answering the question, " Do you approve of the instruc- 

 tion of students by means of experimentalism on living animals ? " he states 

 that he taught physiology in a medical school for many years without ex- 

 periments and his classes got on well. Afterward he introduced a few ex- 

 periments, which were rendered painless, and found that they required so 

 much time as to crowd out other subjects; that two students rarely saw the 

 phenomena in the same way ; and that some students were led to give 

 undue attention to the matters that were illustrated experimentally. He 

 therefore abandoned the experiments. The eighth question relates to legal 

 restrictions on vivisection. It appears that there is a license law in Eng- 

 land similar to what the American vivisection prohibitionists are trying to 

 have enacted for the District of Columbia. Sir Benjamin condemns it 

 utterly. He says that "it prevents men of really original mind from 

 working out valuable original inquiries. Men like William Harvey, 

 Thomas Willis, John Hunter, or Wilson Philip could never have worked 

 under it." Further, that most of the objections to it " are minor when com- 



* Biological Experimentation. By Sir Benjamin Ward Richardson, M. D., P. R. S. Pp. 170, 16mo. 

 London : George Bell & Sons ; New York : The Macmillan Co. Price, $1. 



