DO THE SIMPLER ANIMALS FEEL TAIN? 329 



fess that my susceptibility altogether disqualifies me from wit- 

 nessing, much more from performing experiments accompanied 

 with pain. It was a long while before I was able to justify the 

 French and Germans in their wholesale slaughter of puppies, 

 cats, rabbits, and guinea-pigs. Nor can they be justified except 

 by the austere necessities of science. When this is their object, 

 we are wrong to accuse them of cruelty, because cruelty is the 

 indulgence of tyrannous love of power, and their purpose is 

 the grave investigation of truth. Cruel they are not, unless 

 surgery be also cruelty. And in any case the reproach 

 comes with an ill grace from men who torture animals in 

 the way of mere sport, as in hunting, fishing, and the like. 

 I have said thus much in extenuation of vivisections, al- 

 though, as before intimated, my own organisation renders it 

 impossible for me to witness them in the case of the higher 

 animals. With lower animals the case is altogether different. 

 They feel no pain. If Ave know anything about them, we 

 know that. You are sceptical ? You want to know how it 

 can be proved that these animals feel no pain. It is of course 

 impossible for us to say accurately what any animal feels ; 

 we cannot even know what our fellow- beings feel ; we can 

 only approximately guess, interpreting their gestures and 

 cries according to our own experience. Admitting to the 

 full this initial difficulty, we may nevertheless assert that, if 

 it is allowable to make any statement on this point, there are 

 certain capital facts which force the conclusion upon us, that 

 so far from Pain being common to all animals, it is, on the 

 contrary, the consequence of a veiy high degree of speciali- 

 sation, and is only met with in animals of complex organisa- 



2e 



