VIVISECTION, 681 



the physiology of the nervous system — compared with which all the 

 rest of physiology, judged either from a practical or from a theoreti- 

 cal point of view, is a mere appendage — has been gained by experi- 

 ment, that its fundamental truths have come to us through inquiries 

 entailing more or less vivisection. By meditating over the differences 

 in structure visible in the nervous systems of different animals, a 

 shrewd observer might guess at the use of some particular part ; but 

 till verified by experiment, the guess would remain a guess ; and ex- 

 periment shows that such guesses may be entirely wrong. Where ex- 

 periment has given a clew, careful observations have frequently thrown 

 light on physiological problems. Without the experimental clew, the 

 phenomena would ever have remained a hopeless puzzle, or have 

 served to bolster up some baseless fancy. What disease, or what 

 structure in what animal, could ever have made us acquainted with 

 that " inhibitory " function of the pneumogastric nerve which the 

 vivisectional experiment of Weber first detected ? What a light that 

 one experiment has thrown on the working of the nervous system ! 

 What disease could have told us that which we have learned from the 

 experiments of Du Bois-Reymond and of Pfltiger ?• Where would 

 physiological science be now if the labors of Flourens, Brown-Se- 

 quard, Schiff, Yulpian, Goltz, Waller, and others, were suddenly wiped 

 away from the records of the past ? Yet each of these names recalls 

 long series of experiments, some of them painful in character, on liv- 

 ino; animals. 



I repeat, take away from the physiology of the nervous system 

 the backbone of experimental knowledge, and it would fall into a 

 shapeless, huddled mass. 



The chemistry of living beings, one would imagine at first thoughts, 

 might be investigated without distressing the organisms which formed 

 the subjects of research. The labors of Lavoisier and Priestley, who 

 first made clear the chemistry of respiration, if they entailed no use 

 of the knife, caused at times a no less painful suffocation ; while the 

 great advances which have been made in this branch of the study 

 during the last quarter of a century, and are still being made, neces- 

 sitate almost daily vivisection, in order that the gases of the blood 

 may be studied in exactly the same condition as they are in the living 

 body. Even still more bloody has been the path by following which 

 we have gained the knowledge we now possess of the chemistry of 

 digestion and nutrition. I have only to mention the names of Bidder, 

 and Schmidt, and Bernard, to call to the minct of the physiological 

 student important results, nearly all reached through vivisection. 

 The shifts and changes of the elements within our body are too subtile 

 and complex to be divined from the results of the chemical labora- 

 tory ; the physiologist has to search for them within the body, and to 

 mark the compounds changing in the very spot where they change ; 

 otherwise all is guess-work. 



