76 JOURNAL OF CONCHOLOGY, A'CL. I4, NO. 3, JULY, I9I3. 



natural laws. Both humane persons and those acquainted with food 

 hygiene will agree with me in my crusade. I shall maintain the 

 agitation until it is no longer a misery for the patient oyster to be 

 swallowed alive. I expect to meet with ridicule at first, but in the 

 end humanitarianism will win, as it always does." 



Another convert to this heartrending doctrine is the American 

 pure food expert Dr. Wiley, who depicts the oyster as undergoing 

 agonies on the prongs of a fork and squirming under the stings of 

 pepper and vinegar. He says that " ninety per cent, of the oysters 

 are eaten alive, and suffer excruciating pain wiien jabbed with a fork 

 and sprinkled with condiments." 



But this lurid picture is controverted by the epicure, who would 

 say that oysters are not jabbed with a fork nor made to smart with 

 condiments, but are first treated with a squeeze of lemon and tlien 

 swallowed whole from the shell ; while the naturalist would aver that 

 the pain, if any, would be only that caused by cutting the great 

 adductor muscle which attaches it to the shell, and as this muscle 

 contains no sensory nerves it cannot feel much, if anything. 



According to scientists, indeed, the oyster is a callous animal and 

 does not mind being eaten, but on the contrary vieAvs its approaching 

 deglutition with the greatest equanimity, and may, therefore, be eaten 

 by the most tender-hearted humanitarian without a single mental 

 qualm, and this notwithstanding that Professor Huxley, a well-known 

 authority on the oyster question, hks said in one of his lectures; — 

 " He did not wish to spoil their appreciation of the oyster, but every 

 time they swallowed one of those delicate morsels they were appro- 

 priating to themselves a piece of mechanism which was vastly more 

 delicate and complfcated than the best repeater watch turned out of a 

 modern factory." 



After all, the ethics of the case have been well explained by Dr, 

 Alfred Russel Wallace, in his valuable work on "The World of Life " 

 — " The idea that every living thing thinks and feels and suffers in 

 exactly the same way as a human being is a relic of barbarism. An 

 oyster is a very low form of living being; its nervous system is next 

 to nothing, and all talk about cruelty in eating it is the most utter 



nonsense." " Whatever a giant may feel when he dies, 



if the theory of evolution be true, the poor beetle that we tread upon 

 certainly feels an irreducible n-tinimum of pain, probably none at all." 



There does not appear to be much connection, at first sight, 

 between oysters and consumption, but recently the leading medical 

 journal {^Lancet, Oct., i8, 191 2), described a treatment which has 

 been carried out by MM. J. Carles and B. Laquet, the clinical results 

 of which have proved highly satisfactory, and vastly preferable to the 

 simple method of drinking sea-water (which is very nasty) recom- 



