1876.] 
Vivisection , 
319 
scious of their feelings, like a man under the influence of 
chloroform. On the contrary we will, for the present, take 
it as proven that animals both feel and know that they feel. 
We turn to our first case, the infliction of death, and 
consequently of pain, in defence of our persons and property. 
In virtue of that struggle for existence which, whether 
“ Darwinism ” be true or false, is an acknowledged faCt, one 
species can only exist at the cost of others. There are 
beings — too man}^ to be here enumerated— -which, direCtly 
or indirectly, seek to make man their prey. From the lion, 
the tiger, the cobra, or the shark, down to the flea, the mos- 
quito, the Lucilia hominivora * the berne, the tape-worm, the 
Trichina , and even to those microscopic beings which are 
now believed to be the propagators of pestilence, we are at- 
tacked in our persons by an incalculable horde of enemies. 
At the same time we have indirect assailants scarcely less 
formidable. The rat, the mouse, the locust, the mole- 
cricket, the potato-beetle, weevils, flies, and slugs of many 
kinds, seek our destruction by the process of destroying our 
means of subsistence. We have, therefore, simply the al- 
ternative placed before us to kill or to be killed. We have 
so far — with the exception of certain Oriental fanatics — 
eledted the former alternative, and with bullets, traps, poi- 
sons, medicines, and appliances of the most varied kinds, 
we wage war alike against wild beasts, vermin, Entozoa, 
and disease-germs. So far our humanitarian zealots have 
discovered no wickedness in this struggle, and have not yet 
proposed to substitute “ arbitration ” as a means of dealing 
with “ man-eaters .’ 5 This, we presume, is a pleasure held 
in reserve for posterity. 
We may therefore assume that the right to exist involving 
the right to kill, and it being generally impracticable to kill 
* Van Beneden’s “ Animal Parasites and Messmates ” — a work which might 
have been expressly written as the reductio ad absurdum of the old Natural 
History — contains the following notice of this detestable vermin ; — “ Vercam- 
mer, a military surgeon of the Belgian army, relates that a soldier in Mexico 
had his glottis destroyed, and the sides and roof of his mouth rendered rugged 
and torn, as if a cutting-punch had been driven into those organs. This soldier 
threw up with his spittle more than two hundred of the larvae of this insedt.” 
Yet the author opens his subjedt with the following passage, conceived in the 
true spirit of Cuvier, or of the Bridgewater Treatises : — “ In that great drama 
which we call Nature each animal plays its especial part, and He who has ad- 
justed and regulated everything in its due order and proportion watches with 
as much care over the preservation of the most repulsive insedt as over the 
young of the most brilliant bird. Each as it comes into the world thoroughly 
knows its part, and plays it the better because it is more free to obey the dic- 
tates of its instindt.” The idea of a being whose “ especial part,” divinely 
adjusted and regulated, is to destroy the glottis of man and to punch holes in 
the roof and sides of his mouth, is somewhat suggestive. 
