VIVISECTION. 673 



. tween any two of them varies within very wide limits. For our pur- 

 poses it will perhaps be best to take the second as marking the end of 

 life, to say that an animal is still alive so long as the heart is beating, 

 and air enters into and issues from the chest. 



It is very desirable that a discussion, the decision upon which must 

 be of the utmost importance to physiology at least, should not be 

 turned aside to any false issues. The question whether vivisection is 

 a bad thing is in no wise settled by asserting that there are many 

 things equally bad. Thus, to say that the evil wrought upon animals 

 in the name of science is but a flea-bite compared to that done in the 

 name of sport, is simply to bring forward a tic quoque argument of no 

 real worth, except to stop the mouths of particular opponents. When 

 an ardent sportsman, or when one, no sportsman himself, but having 

 a theoretical admiration of the pleasures of the field, declaims against 

 vivisection, it may be worth while to remind such a one of some of 

 the agonies of sport — of the scenes which accompany a battue or a 

 pigeon-match ; of wounded birds dragging their maimed bodies to 

 some hidden covert, there to die a lingering death ; of the piercing 

 squeals of the hunted hare ; of the last moments of the brave fox, 

 when, after a fruitless struggle, the time comes for his living body to 

 be torn by the pursuing hounds ; to ask him how often a living object 

 of sport is by some purposeful, sudden blow, humanely killed " to put 

 it out of its misery; " to suggest to him, as a matter of reflection, that, 

 had we any satisfactory measure of pain, it would be found that all 

 the pain which physiologists have caused, since their science began, is 

 less than that which the animal creation has suffered in the field from 

 the hands of the members of the two Houses of Parliament since the 

 last general election. It may be of use to say this to a sportsman ; 

 but vivisection is not thereby justified. It is no use saying it at all to 

 those who are now agitating this question. They are equally opposed 

 to cruelty in sport as to cruelty in science ; but they are also wise in 

 their generation. They see that there is far more hope of putting 

 down the one than the other. Biologists and physiologists are at 

 the present moment clearly in disrepute. To call them atheists, is 

 to show one's self a man of spirit and intelligence. Following out 

 their own science, along the path Nature has pointed out to them, 

 they have run counter to many established opinions and cherished 

 views. Divorced by the divergence of their respective methods in 

 large measure from the mathematicians and physicists, to whom ortho- 

 doxy is easy, accused of materialism, active in the support of Darwin- 

 ism and evolution theories, believed by the many to have' no faith — 

 their position not a little resembles that of the Jews in the middle 

 ages ; they are just in the condition in which the accusation of cruelty 

 is most tellingly made and most readily credited against them by a 

 vulgar public. This the opponents of vivisection know full well ; and 

 therefore it is against the physiologists and not against the pigeon- 

 vol. iv. — 43 



