VIVISECTION. 675 



the lifeless forces of the universe. The very conditions of his exist- 

 ence lay upon him the burden, and in so doing give him the right, to 

 use the world around him, the lives of animals included, to aid him 

 in his strife. Imagine the results of forbidding man to take away the 

 lives of animals. Suppose, for instance, the whole human race were to 

 form itself into a Society for the Prevention of the Destruction of Ti- 

 gers. How many generations would pass before " the last man " pro- 

 vided a tumultuous crowd of tigers with the last human meal? — pos- 

 sibly the indefatigable secretary of the Society sealing with his death 

 his loyalty to the cause. Or, since tigers, like man, are carnivorous, 

 and might therefore be supposed more worthy of death than herbiv- 

 orous creatures, let us suppose the efforts of the Society to be directed 

 toward the preservation of sheep. How many generations would 

 pass before the face of the earth were covered with woolly flocks, and 

 man were driven to lead a laborious, frugivorous, arboreal life on the 

 tree-tops, or to earn a scanty subsistence on resuscitated JPfahlbaiUen, 

 as being the only places where the necessities of the sheep would per- 

 mit him to dwell ? Did the reader ever by chance descend, at early 

 dawn, into the kitchen and watch the convulsive agonies of a writhing 

 heap of cockroaches drowning in the watery trap set for them by the 

 cook overnight ? What a scene of unutterable woe is that when 

 judged from the stand-point of the cockroach ! But, if man were to 

 deny himself the right of vivisection or' vivipression over the vermin 

 which infest his home and bed, what would come of it ? 



To be serious : man, if he is to live and prosper, must kill other 

 animals. It is a duty laid upon him by the nature of things ; a duty, 

 and therefore a right. Self-preservation demands it. But what do we 

 mean by self-preservation ? Can we draw a line and say that he is 

 justified in slaying an animal for this purpose and not for that ? We 

 can only do so by applying the test of whether the death of the ani- 

 mal is useful to him or not. Whenever or wherever the death of an 

 animal is of advantage either to himself or to the human society of 

 which he is a unit, he is justified in slaying that animal. 



The success of the human race in the struggle for existence depends 

 on man's being well fed ; man is therefore justified in slaying and 

 eating a sheep. The success of the human race in the struggle for ex- 

 istence is dependent on knowledge being increased ; man is therefore 

 justified in slaying a frog or a rabbit, if it can be shown that human 

 knowledge is thereby enlarged. 



Death is in itself painful. It is only by special means that the 

 pangs amid which the ties of life are loosened can be done- away with. 

 The slaughter of an animal is therefore of necessity painful, except in 

 the special cases where means have been taken to do away with pain. 

 In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, when an animal is slaughtered 

 by man, it is the death of the animal which benefits man, the pain 

 itself which accompanies the death does him no good at all. While 



