830 



SCIENCE 



[N. S. Vol. XXX. No. 780 



petent persons to endeavor to benefit man- 

 kind through experiments on animals, to 

 examine in some detail the writings of 

 some of the leaders in the present outbreak 

 of antivivisection sentiment, both in this 

 country and in foreign countries, and I 

 have been forcibly impressed with the low 

 intellectual and moral tone therein dis- 

 played. Some of its writers frankly con- 

 fess—and this is not exaggeration— that 

 were it a question of the life of the animal 

 or the human being, they would save the 

 former — a sentiment the abnormality of 

 which needs no comment. If the antivivi- 

 sectionist is ignorant of what actually 

 goes on in scientific laboratories, he has no 

 moral right to inveigh against the method 

 of animal experimentation. If he takes the 

 rare position of doing so with fuU knowl- 

 edge, he excludes himself from the multi- 

 tude, who believe in the beneficence of 

 science and put their trust in those who 

 follow her lead. It is idle to maintain that 

 the man who has the high-mindedness, the 

 intelligence, the patience and the skill to 

 perform the scientific experiment, needs 

 the threat of a penal conviction to teach 

 him obedience to the principles of common 

 humaneness. The antivivisection move- 

 ment is the least worthy and commendable 

 of all movements that profess to be uplift- 

 ing, and it is only those whose sense of 

 moral proportions has become askew, who 

 enter actively into it. For you who are 

 soon to become practitioners of medicine it 

 is a duty which you owe to your profession 

 to instruct your patients concerning the 

 methods and the value of animal experi- 

 mentation and to influence them to main- 

 tain toward it an attitude of sanity. 



To deny the value of the remarkable dis- 

 covery of Jenner, now with more than a 

 century's evidence in its support, and with 

 recent allied discoveries confirming its 

 scientific significance, is merely wilful: 



Yet a well-known writer concludes an ex- 

 tended discussion of the subject with these 

 words: 



That vaccination is a gigantic delusion; that 

 it has never saved a single life; but that it has 

 been the cause of so much disease, so many deaths, 

 such a vast amount of utterly needless and alto- 

 gether undeserved suffering, that it wiiW be classed 

 by the coming generation among the greatest 

 errors of an ignorant and prejudiced age, and its 

 penal enforcement the foulest blot on the generally 

 beneficent course of legislation during our century. 



It is interesting that in the same volume 

 the author utters a long lament over the 

 neglect which the world has given to 

 phrenology, and prophesies that in the 

 coming century "it will prove itself to be 

 the true science of mind. ' ' The author of 

 these remarkable pronouncements, Alfred 

 Russell Wallace, made important contribu- 

 tions to science during his early life, but 

 there is a sad intellectual contrast between 

 his discovery, announced coincidently with 

 that of Charles Darwin, of the principle of 

 the origin of species through the agency of 

 natural selection in the struggle for exist- 

 ence, and his indefensible stand, sixty 

 years later, regarding vaccination and 

 phrenology. 



Opposition to vaccination is not new. 

 Even in the days of Jenner its opponents 

 are said to have claimed that its tendency 

 "was to cause bovine characteristics to 

 appear in children: that they developed 

 horns, hoofs and tails, and bellowed like 

 cattle." The objections of recent years 

 have been less picturesque, and have been 

 confined largely to a denial of the efficacy 

 of vaccination in the prevention of dis- 

 ease and the saving of life. Reliable sta- 

 tistics from communities where vaccination 

 has been compulsory and has been rigidly 

 enforced clearly disprove this claim. 

 Thus, it is said on authority that in recent 

 years the mortality from smallpox in 

 France, where there is only a partial and 



