460 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxix 



It is, I hope, unnecessary for me to give a formal contradic- 

 tion to the silly fiction, which is assiduously circulated by the 

 fanatics who not only ought to know, but do know, that their 

 assertions are untrue, that I have advocated the introduction 

 of that experimental discipline which is absolutely indispensable 

 to the professed physiologist, into elementary teaching. 



Moreover, during the debates on the Vivisection Bill in 

 1876, the late Lord Shaftesbury made use of this story. 

 Huxley was extremely indignant, and wrote home : — 



Did you see Lord Shaftesbury's speech in Tuesday's Times? 

 I saw it by chance,* and have written a sharp letter to the 



Times. ' 



This letter appeared on May 26, when he wrote again : — 



You will have had my note, and know all about Lord 

 Shaftesbury and his lies by this time. Surely you could not 

 imagine on any authority that I was such an idiot as to recom- 

 mend 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 reported 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 contra- 

 diction 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 sub- 

 ject of Lord Shaftesbury's misquotation and misrepresentation 

 stands as follows : — 



" For the purpose of acquiring a practical, though ele- 

 mentary, acquaintance with physiological anatomy and his- 



* Being in Edinburgh, he had been reading the Scotch papers, and 

 " the reports of the Scotch papers as to what takes place in Parliament 

 are meagre." 



