474 LIFE OF PROFESSOR HUXLEY chap, xxix 



the Strength of which legislation was recommended went 

 beyond the facts, the report went beyond the evidence, the 

 recommendations beyond the report, and the bill can hardly 

 be said to have gone beyond the recommendations, but 

 rather to have contradicted them." 



As to the working of the law Huxley referred to it the 

 following year in the address, already cited, on " Elementary 

 Instruction in Physiology " (Coll. Essays, iii. 310). 



But while I should object to any experimentation which can 

 justly be called painful, and while as a member of a late Royal 

 Commission I did my best to prevent the infliction of needless 

 pain for any purpose, I think it is my duty to take this oppor- 

 tunity of expressing my regret at a condition of the law which 

 permits a boy to troll for pike or set lines with live frog bait 

 for idle amusement, and at the same time lays the teacher of 

 that boy open to the penalty of fine and imprisonment if he uses 

 the same animal for the purpose of exhibiting one of the most 

 beautiful and instructive of physiological spectacles — the cir- 

 culation in the web of the foot. No one could undertake to 

 affirm that a frog is not inconvenienced by being wrapped up 

 in a wet rag and having his toes tied out, and it cannot be denied 

 that inconvenience is a sort of pain. But you must not inflict 

 the least pain on a vertebrated animal for scientific purposes 

 (though you may do a good deal in that way for gain or for 

 sport) without due licence of the Secretary of State for the 

 Home Department, granted under the authority of the Vivi- 

 section Act. 



So it comes about that, in this year of grace 1877, two per- 

 sons may be charged with cruelty to animals. One has impaled 

 a frog, and suffered the creature to writhe about in that con- 

 dition for hours ; the other has pained the animal no more than 

 one of us would be pained by tying strings round his fingers 

 and keeping him in the position of a hydropathic patient. The 

 first offender says, " I did it because I find fishing very amus- 

 ing," and the magistrate bids him depart in peace — nay, probably 

 wishes him good sport. The second pleads, " I wanted to im- 

 press a scientific truth with a distinctness attainable in no 

 other way on the minds of my scholars," and the magistrate 

 fines him five pounds. 



I cannot but think that this is an anomalous and not wholly 

 creditable state of things. 



