1 883.] 
The Vivisection Question . 
739 
IX. AN AMERICAN VIEW OF THE VIVISECTION 
QUESTION. 
S HE book we take as the basis of our remarks, originally 
published in England, is one of several recent signs 
that British physiologists are at last coming to their 
senses, and, instead of attempting to conceal the faCt that 
they experiment on animals, have decided to explain to the 
general public what a vivisection is, and why vivisections 
are necessary. Philanthropos, who is evidently well in- 
formed, discusses without passion or prejudice such topics 
as “What is pain?” “What is cruelty?” “Our rights 
over animals,” “ What is vivisection ? ” “ The relation of 
experiment to physiology,” “ The relation of medicine to 
experiment,” and so forth. If our colleagues across the 
water had, some seven or eight years ago, shown sufficient 
courage to trust to the common sense of the majority of 
their countrymen, and had endeavoured to inform the laity 
by securing the publication and distribution of some such 
book as this, the anti-viviseCtion legislation could hardly 
have been enaCted. Its passage, and the still-continued 
agitation for an ACt of Parliament totally forbidding all ex- 
periment on living animals, prove that the public did not 
and does not know enough about the matter to save itself 
from being misled by the reckless misstatements of irre- 
sponsible fanatics, and of certain seekers after notoriety or 
salary. 
People in general do not read official blue-books ; so, in 
spite of the faCt that the Royal Commisaion appointed to 
investigate the matter reported that, after prolonged and 
careful inquiry, it could find no evidence that English phy- 
siologists were guilty of cruelty, it has been possible for 
certain anti-viviseCtors, by a persistent course of malignant 
vituperation and brazen mendacity, to produce a wide-spread 
belief that vivisection essentially consists in torturing an 
animal for the objeCt of seeing how much it can suffer with- 
out dying. That such is the aCtual conviction of many 
worthy men and women in England we know to be the case. 
The physiologists kept silent, and left the field to their ene- 
mies, with disastrous result ; no one, not a brute, who 
believed half the stories circulated, could fail to hate physi- 
ology and physiologists. When the railroad stations of 
