TRANSACTIONS OF SECTION D. — DEPT. ANATOMY AND PHYSIOLOGY. 413 



I have hitherto rested the wbole argument upon the lawfulness of inflicting 

 pain and death upon the lower animals for the sake of science and humanity, but 

 as a matter of fact I may again assure those who, while assenting to the justice of 

 the plea, yet shrink from what it may involve, that the great majority of experi- 

 ments upon animals are rendered painless, and that the remainder are mostly those 

 experiments which are most immediately and directly subservient to medical art, 

 and which happily are generally productive rather of discomfort than of pain. 

 Let me give you an example of such a vivisection, far more painful than the 

 immense majority of those of the laboratory. Suppose a country surgeon were 

 sent for late at night to some case of urgent peril ; knowing that his ride is for life 

 or death, and unsparing of himself or his horse, he rides him to the utmost limits 

 of endurance, and beyond : who would not applaud the action ? Those only who 

 appear deliberately to believe that our life is worth less than that of many sparrows, 

 those legislators only who look forward to the time when wars will cease, not 

 because of human slaughter, of devastated homes, of all the horrors which the 

 world has endured for centuries, but because of the cruelties to which the horses 

 in the artillery are subjected. We, who are familiar with human suffering and 

 sorrow, which our knowledge is all too feeble to prevent, best understand how 

 in testing some new remedy on a less precious fellow-creature than a man, one who 

 is truly humane may be tempted to forget the comparatively trivial suffering of a 

 rabbit or a frog. 



But some enthusiastic opponent will say, ' I cannot pretend to doubt that these 

 experiments are in every sense of the word useful, but we ought not to purchase 

 the benefit they confer by inflicting pain upon innocent creatures. I would sign a 

 petition to-morrow to put down all field sports by law, I would allow no opera- 

 tion upon domestic animals, and I will abstain from all animal food until I am 

 certain that I can eat creatures which have been killed without suffering pain. But 

 if I were lying at the point of death, and you brought an animal to my bedside and 

 assured me that by putting it to pain my life could be saved, I would refuse to pur- 

 chase it on such cruel terms.' We may hope that the excellent person who made this 

 heroic profession would in the hour of trial be better advised, but if not we may 

 surely reply, ' Bight reverend sir, you are the best judge of the value of your own 

 life, and if you think proper to sacrifice it to the comfort of a guinea-pig we must 

 submit to the loss with such resignation as we can muster ; but when you say that 

 in obedience to this silly whim you will let your dearest friend suffer, allow the 

 sacrifice of the most important life, and forbid those studies which have already 

 rescued multitudes from deformity and misery and death, then those of us who 

 have to do with the real responsibilities of life, and on whom presses the awful 

 sense of impotence to which our defective science too often leaves us, answer that 

 we too have duties to fulfil, and to the best of our power we mean conscientiously 

 to fulfil them. 



There is, I fear, another reason which animates much of the opposition to 

 physiological experiments. It is nothing else than aversion from the methods and 

 the results of science. It may be that an excuse for this dislike has been furnished 

 by the pretence of false science, and the arrogance of much even which is true. 

 But surely, no reasonable creature, from such trivial irritation, can deliberately 

 wish to check the progress of accurate knowledge by observation and experiment. 

 There are, indeed, some who, fearing (as I think prudently) that, while a little 

 knowledge inclineth men to Atheism, greater knowledge turneth them round again 

 to religion, and desiring to subject the human mind to a bondage as hard and more 

 degrading than that of mediaeval Borne, would gladly call off interest from the 

 unremunerative labours which are prompted only by the thirst for knowledge and 

 faith in the possibility of learning more and more of the divine order of the world, 

 to pursuits which bring obvious and material utility. There are those again, who, 

 fearing (as I think foolishly) that increasing knowledge of this Divine order will 

 lower our admiration of its beauty, or that the better a man understands the laws of 

 God the more likely he is to break them, have an unfeigned dislike for natural 

 science in general, and for Biology in particular. They repeat over again the error 

 of which the Dominican friars with far greater excuse were guilty when they im- 

 prisoned Galileo. If any such are here, may I venture to tell them — in quietness 



