1876 LETTER TO THE "TIMES" 155 



not imagine on any authority that I was such an idiot as 

 to recommend boys and girls to perform experiments 

 which are difficult to skilled anatomists, to say nothing 

 of other reasons. 



LETTER TO THE TIMES 



In your account of the late debate in the House of 

 Lords on the Vivisection Bill, Lord Shaftesbury is re- 

 ported to have said that in my Lessons in Elementary 

 Physiology, it is strongly insisted that such experiments 

 as those subjoined shall not merely be studied in the 

 manual, but actually repeated, either by the boys and 

 girls themselves or else by the teachers in their presence, 

 as plainly appears from the preface to the second edition. 



I beg leave to give the most emphatic and unqualified 

 contradiction to this assertion, for which there is not a 

 shadow of justification either in the preface to the second 

 edition of my Lessons or in anything I have ever said or 

 written elsewhere. The most important paragraph of the 

 preface which is the subject of Lord Shaftesbury's mis- 

 quotation and misrepresentation stands as follows : 



"For the purpose of acquiring a practical, though 

 elementary, acquaintance with physiological anatomy 

 and histology, the organs and tissues of the commonest 

 domestic animals afford ample materials. The principal 

 points in the structure and mechanism of the heart, the 

 lungs, the kidneys, or the eye of man may be perfectly 

 illustrated by the corresponding parts of a sheep ; while 

 the phenomena of the circulation, and many of the most 

 important properties of living tissues are better shown by 

 the common frog than by any of the higher animals." 



If Lord Shaftesbury had the slightest theoretical or 

 practical acquaintance with the subject about which he 

 is so anxious to legislate, he would know that physio- 

 logical anatomy is not exactly the same thing as experi- 

 mental physiology ; and he would be aware that the 



