VIVISECTION. 685 



would collapse, leaving nothing but a few isolated facts of human ex- 

 perience. 



As far as we can see, what has been will be. The physiology of 

 the future, if not hampered by any ignorant restraint, will, out of the 

 death of animals, continue to press further and further into the mys- 

 tery of — and year by year bring the physician, and not the physician 

 only, but every one, power to prolong, to strengthen, and to purify — 

 the life of man. By no other way can man hope to gain this end. 

 He is thereby justified for the death he causes and the pain he gives. 



We have yet to consider this question in its other aspect ; we have 

 to examine not only the effects of vivisection as far as animals are 

 concerned, but also its influence on man himself. Little, however, 

 need be said. Necessary vivisection, we have shown, cannot be called 

 cruel. The question of the necessity of any particular case can only 

 be judged by the investigator himself. I content myself with assert- 

 ing that any attempt to draw up, for the guidance of others, a general 

 definition of necessary and unnecessary vivisection, must prove ut- 

 terly futile. Only he who is making an inquiry knows his own needs. 

 If he experiments recklessly and needlessly, he becomes cruel, and, 

 being cruel, will thereby be the worse. But, if he experiments care- 

 fully and needfully, never causing pain where it could be avoided, 

 never sacrificing a life without having in view some object, to attain 

 which there seemed no other way, remembering that whoever "tor- 

 tures" either dead or living nature carelessly will get no true re- 

 sponse, there is no reason why his moral nature should suffer even ever 

 so little tarnish. On the contrary, experience teaches us that earnest 

 physiologists, who haVe killed animals in the single hope of gaining 

 new truths or of making old ones plain, have grown more gentle and 

 more careful the longer they worked and the more experiments they 

 made. 



The effects of vivisection on the moral nature of man may fairly be 

 tested by experience. There are in this country several physiologists 

 — myself among the number — who have for several years performed 

 experiments on living animals. We have done repeatedly the things 

 which a distinguished lady has seen fit to say " are best spoken of as 

 nameless." I can confidently appeal to all who know us, whether 

 they have seen any deterioration in our moral nature, as the result of 

 our work ; whether we are to-day less careful of giving pain than we 

 were when we began to experiment ; whether they can trace in us any 

 lessening of that sympathy with dumb animals, which all men should 

 feel even in the very thickest of the struggle for existence. — Macmil- 

 lan's Magazine. 



