VIVISECTION. 447 



and assuredly not prompted by the former. All who have 

 had at any time to concern themselves with the unravelling 

 of truth by experiment leading to evidence, will be at no loss 

 to appreciate at its full worth a demonstration arrived at 

 under such a combination of circumstances. 



It may be reasonably apprehended, that a full and just 

 appreciation of the value of the knowledge conveyed by the 

 discovery that the anterior root-filaments of a spinal nerve 

 are wholly motor, whereas the posterior root-filaments are 

 wholly sensitive, will be impossible to one except he has 

 undergone medical training. I must therefore beg, by pos- 

 tulate, the concession of that value. 



The concession made, then will the conclusion be obvious, 

 that the discovery effected by Sir Charles Bell could only 

 have been arrived at by vivisection. No apparatus, save that 

 of living animal organism, could have been made to reveal a 

 function appertaining to animal life. No experiment, short 

 of operating upon a living spinal chord, could have made 

 known the separate and respective functions of the anterior 

 and posterior spinal roots. 



So soon as the idea of duality of function corresponding 

 with duality of form, in the origin of these spinal nerves, 

 had suggested itself to Bell, the promptings of curiosity, the 

 love of truth all the complexity of impulses and motives, by 

 which an experimentalist is urged along in his experimental 

 course, he hardly knows how or wherefore must have 

 tempted him to solve by vivisection the suggested mystery. 

 The temptation must have been one of a force and energy 

 and wildness beyond general ability to conceive. Did Sir 

 Charles Bell readily yield to the temptation legitimate al- 

 though I submit it to have been ? Did he lay hold of the 

 first brute creature that fell in his way, and vivisect that 

 creature ? By no means. He distinctly gives his readers to 

 understand that he long deferred the performance of an ex- 

 periment which would have solved the question that had pre- 



