206 
EXPANSION OE THE FOOT. 
done so without displaying personal ill feelings;” and again, “ but 
at some future opportunity it is probable you will find any observa- 
tions you made answered, although not addressed to you per- 
sonally.” This last paragraph can only be interpreted in one way, 
as a threat held up over me in terror em ; but I must own that I 
go a step further, and couple this paragraph with that disgraceful 
effusion under the title of “ Shoeing Smiths,” which immediately 
followed, and the internal evidence bears me very forcibly out in 
this conjecture; but looking on this departure from propriety as an 
effect of passion, disappointment, and want of acquaintance with 
literary usages, and therefore not to he harshly dealt with, and 
perhaps also feeling with Garrick — 
“ ’Tis the first folly of a simple youth, 
Caught and deluded in some doubtful ways — 
Then crush not in the shell this infant Bayes. 
Exert your favour to a young beginner, 
Nor use the stripling like a batter’d sinner,” 
I replied, from which I will only give one extract. “ If my 
remarks were wrong, they are open to refutation ; but as such has 
not been done, I have nothing to say further on the subject. As 
to your remark, that I may be animadverted on at some future 
time, does not give me a moment’s uneasiness; so far from it, I 
shall be delighted at such an event.” The dates of this corre- 
spondence are October 21 and 22, 1849. I have heard or seen 
nothing in reply up to this date. My denials remain unrefuted, 
and until this is done no man of proper feeling would or could 
reply to another. The denial stops the further prosecution until 
it is disproved. 
The writing to me privately instead of publicly answering me, 
and supporting his own doctrines, is so flimsy a veil to hide defeat, 
that a very child must see through it ; and there the matter would 
and should have rested, but for the remark at p. 183 in the last 
Number — “ nothing is likely to pass current save the result of 
actual experiment .” I have shewn the nature of the experiments 
upon which we were called on to rely. It is true that nothing can 
be easier than to repeat Mr. Gloag’s famous experiments with 
the dead foot and the vice : I have done the same thing some 
hundred times, and with very opposite results. It is true that Mr. 
Gloag’s experiments are on paper; but we must, after all, take the 
results upon his veracity, which for an instant I do not call in 
question ; but, by the same rule, I claim to have my results be- 
lieved from the experiments I have made. The numbers on which 
“ experiments ” were made I cannot now tell ; they must be seve- 
ral hundreds, and all upon living working animals. I only men- 
tion the years in which they occurred. In the year 1822 the 
