334 THE LIFE OF PASTEUR 



lecture halls the most fallacious judgments on the work of 

 scientists. 



Pasteur might have brought him, to support his statements 

 relative to certain deviations of ideas and sentiments, number- 

 less letters which reached him regularly from England — letters 

 full of threats, insults and maledictions, devoting him to 

 eternal torments for having multiplied his crimes on the hens, 

 guinea-pigs, dogs and sheep of the laboratory. Love of animals 

 carries some women to such lengths ! 



It would have been interesting, if, after Yirchow's speech, 

 some French physician had in his turn related a series of facts^ 

 showing how prejudices equally tenacious had had to be 

 struggled against in France, and how savants had succeeded 

 in enforcing the certainty that there can be no pathological 

 science if Physiology is not progressing, and that it can only 

 progress by means of the experimental method. Claude 

 Bernard had expressed this idea under so many forma 

 that it would almost have been enough to give a few extracta 

 from his works. 



In 1841, when he was Magendie's curator, he was one day 

 attending a lesson on experimental j^hysiology, when he saw 

 an old man come in, whose costume — a long coat with a 

 straight collar and a hat with a very wide brim — indicated a 

 Quaker. 



^'Thou hast no right,*' he said, addressing Magendie, **to 

 kill animals or to make them suffer. Thou givest a wicked 

 example and thou accustomest thy fellow creatures to cruelty.'* 



Magendie replied that it was a pity to look at it from that 

 point of view, and that a physiologist, when moved by the 

 thought of making a discovery useful to Medicine, and conse- 

 quently useful to his fellow creatures, did not deserve that 

 reproach. 



''Your countryman Harvey,*^ said he, hoping to convince 

 him, ''would not have discovered the circulation of the blood 

 if he had not made some experiments in vivisection. That 

 discovery was surely worth the sacrifice of a few deer in Charles 

 the First 's Park ? ' * 



But the Quaker stuck to his idea; his mission, he said, was 

 to drive three things from this world : war, hunting and shoot- 

 ing, and experiments on live animals. Magendie had to show 

 him out. 



Three years later, Claude Bernard, in his turn, was taxed 



