THE STUDY OF PHYSIOLOGY. 51 



both offenses, and secondly that since in the one case their opinions 

 are opposed to the practice of genteel society, and in the other to the 

 convictions of all who are qualified to judge, they should at least con- 

 template the possibility of being mistaken. Putting the question of 

 field sports altogether aside, you know perfectly well that in every 

 village in England an extremely painful mutilation is constantly per- 

 formed upon domestic animals in no registered laboratory, under no 

 anaesthetics, and with no object but the convenience and profit of the 

 owner. You remember how, when an epidemic threatened the destruc- 

 tion of valuable property, every booby peer now eager to stop, so far 

 as in him lay, the advance of knowledge, was no less eager to have 

 carried out at the public expense any slaughter and any experiments, 

 painful or otherwise, which would save his pocket. 



But you will say: All this seems reasonable enough; but if so, how 

 do you account for the prejudice against you ; what has induced so 

 many amiable and otherwise sane persons to join in the outcry against 

 physiology ? 



First, I answer, it is due to the most frequent cause of folly — ig- 

 norance. Many persons, supposed to be educated, are so destitute of 

 the most ordinary conceptions of natural science that they do not un- 

 derstand the necessity for experiments. So little do they appreciate 

 the difference between formal knowledge and real knowledge, that a 

 distinguished statesman once assured me that he would as soon have 

 his leg set by a man who had gained what he called his knowledge 

 from books, as by one who had " walked the hospitals." Next, there is 

 the vulgar dislike of whatever is not obviously and immediately useful. 

 When knowledge for its own sake is in question, those of the baser 

 sort are always ready to cry, with equal ignorance of literature and of 

 science, " Cut bono ? " 



In another class of persons, less ignorant and less stupid than these 

 two, opposition to physiological experiments appears to spring from 

 what may fairly be stigmatized as sentiment, that is to say, excitable, 

 rather than deep feeling, uncontrolled by reason. People first gratify 

 their fancy by calling cats and dogs our fellow creatures, which, in 

 one sense, undoubtedly they are, and then, by the familiar fallacy of an 

 ambiguous middle term, argue that it is cruel to put our fellow crea- 

 tures to pain ; or, as some would add, to reduce them to slavery, or to 

 use them in any way for our own, rather than their good. Such per- 

 sons compel their fellow creatures to drag them through the streets, 

 they eat their fellow creatures when sufiiciently vivisected to be pala- 

 table, and then find philosophical excuses for those who kill their fel- 

 low creatures for fun. But they are properly shocked when their fel- 

 low creatures are hurt or killed for the benefit of mankind. Such 

 persons have been accused of feminine weakness ; but I must say that 

 I never have found an intelligent woman who could not see the rights 

 of the case when fairly explained to her, whereas I have met a few 



