353 
1883 .] Analyses oj Books. 
from a medical point of view. There are, as we have shown on 
former occasions, many physiological investigations urgently 
needed, but which conceivably may never have any diredt bear- 
ing upon the methods of the physician, the surgeon, or the vete- 
rinarian. In summing up this sedition the author writes : — “I 
cannot expedt that the fadts and arguments of the foregoing 
chapters will convince every one. When all has been explained 
and argued there will still remain irreconcileables determined to 
persist in their war against scientific experiments. But we can 
now see clearly what this war amounts to. It is an effort to 
keep many animals in suffering instead of few, men instead of 
beasts, the more sensitive creature instead of the less sensitive.” 
To which we add that it is an effort, and in many cases a wilful, 
deliberate attempt to keep mankind in ignorance. 
We now come to a discussion of that phase of the subjedt 
which has elicited from Bestiarians the greatest amount of per- 
versity and wrong-headedness, to wit, the consideration of “ Our 
Rights over Animals.” It is somewhat strange that this ques- 
tion should first be prominently raised in an age which has 
recognised the struggle for existence more distinctly than has 
ever been done before, and has found what this struggle involves. 
Nature seems to have invested every organism with the right to 
destroy, devour, utilise at pleasure any other organism so far as 
it is able. We can only exist by exercising this right. If we 
become too weak, or too fantastically scrupulous, we sign our 
own racial death-warrant. The author writes : — “ The oppo- 
nents of such experiments assert that they are wrong in them- 
selves, and that, therefore, it is time wasted to prove that 
advantages are gained by them, since no profit can justify a crime. 
I most unreservedly admit that no hygienic gain is worth a 
moral loss, and that the health of one man’s body is too dearly 
purchased by the disease of another man’s soul.” 
It seems to us that this admission is of the widest. It may 
strike the careful inquirer that a moral code which involves 
hygienic loss to the community is not improbably tainted with 
error. Perhaps, too, it might be added that grandmotherly legis- 
lation should allow the experimentalist to judge for himself as to 
the effedts of his researches upon his soul. 
The reasons given by Bestiarians why physiological experi- 
ments are wrong in themselves are summed up by the author 
under four heads : — First, that they are cruel ; second, that the 
infliction of pain hardens and demoralises the inflidtor ; third, 
that it is unjust to make animals suffer for our good ; fourth, that 
it is an infringement of their rights which we have no authority 
to make.” 
The first of these contentions the author dismisses, like our- 
selves, as a petitio principii. Such experiments are not cruel 
from any rational definition of cruelty. 
The second consideration holds good only when the production 
