78 THE CANADIAN NATURALIST. [Feb. 



tariaii members of this Association were not many. In the other 

 case, chloroform obliterated the sense of pain, and the use of chlo- 

 roform was now rarely omitted. Tiie utility of vivisection had 

 been strikingly proved in two classes of diseases — diabetes and 

 epilepsy. The latter, frightful to witness, was yet more frightful 

 to suffer — violence and danger for the moment, and dreariness of 

 prospect for the future, and of the way to meet it vivisection had 

 given us at last a hopeful, because a rational, foreshadowing. To 

 diabetes — an equally terrible if less shocking malady — the applica- 

 bility of vivisectional results was even more direct than in refer- 

 ence to epelipsy, thanks to the studies of Dr. Pavy. He would 

 just say further, that, when vivisection was being denounced as 

 causing pain and suffering in a world already so full of both, it 

 would be well to consider that, in this question, as well as in all 

 other human questions, we had to deal with complex considera- 

 tions, and to weigh them one against the other. Absolute cer- 

 tainty was not looked for in morals, absolute demonstration was 

 not given us in religious questions, and absolute freedom from 

 evil was not given to us in any course of practical action we 

 adopt. Vivisection produces a certain amount of pain ; but is 

 this pain voluntarily and of deliberate purpose produced in a few 

 laboratories, greater in amount, in intensity, in duration, than the 

 mental pain, moral distress, and bodily agony endured in many a 

 cottage, many a palace, by the victims of the very two diseases 

 which, in these last years, vivisection has most assisted medicine 

 to combat ? He felt it to be his duty to make this apology for 

 vivisection. Having done so, he passed on to the subject of struc- 

 tural anatomy, and specified the names of numerous writers upon 

 it — both English and Continental. He next dwelt upon the pro- 

 fessional and popular advantages of physiological study, and of a 

 biological training— observing that a thorough scientific training 

 tends, necessarily, to engender modesty and distrust of one's self. 

 He believed he had the authority of their own elder Stephenson 

 for saying that to worldly success there is no gift so necessary as 

 the gift of something quite diff'erent. The bar, the senate, and 

 the hustings delight in verbal antithesis, sharp distinctions, and 

 sweeping assertions, which nature abhors. She knows little of 

 antithesis — she works by gradations ; and he who has studied her 

 truthfully knows that the universality of assertion is generaUy in 

 the inverse ratio of knowleda^e. For success, then, in the brilliant 



