A NEW POISON. 
863 
his day, and he had only to ask the audience to form their 
own judgment as to whether Dr. Brown-Sequard was likely 
to inflict one particle of pain upon any creature whatever 
without having a plain and definite purpose in view. For 
himself he might say that nothing was more grievous to him 
than to think of the existence of pain in anything whatever. 
Neither Dr. Brown-Sequard nor himself was indifferent to 
pain, and he hoped that in no sense were they cruel. He 
thought that the gentleman who brought forward the resolu- 
tion to which he had referred, and the gentleman w^ho sup- 
ported him, hardly knew T what they w T ere dealing with. If 
his friend Dr. Brown-Sequard would pardon his referring to 
a matter personal to him, he wmuld remind the meeting that 
that great experimental physiologist, and that accomplished 
vivisector, w ? ho had, he supposed, performed as many vivisec- 
tions as any man in the world, some years ago thought it 
advisable to turn the vast knowledge of the diagnosis of dis- 
ease which he had obtained by this means into actual practice, 
and he (Professor Huxley) could assure them, from what he 
knew 7 , that before long his wonderful mastery over symptoms 
caused his consulting-rooms to be absolutely crowded by 
human beings suffering under multiform varieties of ner- 
vous disorders, who sought at his hands and from his know- 
ledge that relief which they could not obtain elsewhere. 
The prevention of cruelty to animals, when understood in its 
proper sense, w^as as good an object as men could devote 
themselves to, but when they confounded the brutal violence 
of the carter or the wife-beater with an experiment carried 
out by a man of science, gently and for the purpose of re- 
lieving misery, the enthusiasts in that cause should change 
their name, and convert themselves into a society for the 
promotion of cruelty to mankind. If that question came 
before the Association again, and he hoped it w ? ould, he 
trusted they wrnuld recollect that the order of nature w'assuch 
that certain kinds of truth were only attainable by experi- 
ments upon living animals, and that when they might result 
to the welfare of thousands and thousands of untold human 
beings who might otherwise be suffering unimaginable misery, 
those experiments were perfectly justifiable. 
A NEW POISON. 
In a paper addressed to the French Academy of Sciences, 
iMM. Rebuteau and Peyre have given a description of a plant 
which grows in the vicinity of the French settlement of 
