Vivisection . 
325 
1876.] 
pain needlessly and wantonly, or from taking any pleasure 
in its infliction, seek, by every device conceivable, to mini- 
mise the sufferings of the animals operated upon. The 
smaller the shock given to the subject, and the less its nor- 
mal condition is affeCted in anything beyond the exaCt point 
at issue, the more trustworthy will be the result. The 
biologist, therefore, who should inflict any needless or 
avoidable torment on the animals experimented upon, would 
simply defeat his own objeCt. It is important here to re- 
member that, according to the Report of the “ Royal Com- 
mission on Vivisection,” the Secretary of the Society for the 
Prevention of Cruelty to Animals frankly acknowledges that 
he does not know a single case of wanton cruelty. Surely 
if such an admission is made by the responsible official of a 
powerful and influential organisation, with abundant means 
at command for probing the matter to the very bottom, and 
spurred on to adtion by a sensational outcry, we shall be 
warranted in assuming that no such cases exist. 
Is it, then, rational to attack what is thus confessed to be 
free from “ wanton cruelty,” so long as in other directions 
so much wanton cruelty exists ? 
It is urged that vivisection must have a degrading and 
brutalising effeCt on all who are engaged in it. Such a 
result, they urge, would be especially deplorable in the case 
of medical practitioners, who should be eminently humane 
and sympathetic, if their services are to be acceptable to 
the suffering. 
Had we to deal with ordinary opponents we should chal- 
lenge them to produce an instance of the “ degradation ” of 
which they speak. We should point to illustrious men, 
living and dead, who have enlarged the territory of biological 
science and the resources of medical art by experiments 
upon living animals, and should ask them if the humanity 
of these men had been or could be called in question ? But 
we fear that the anti-vivisedtionists would, in answer to our 
challenge, “ evolve out of their own consciousness” charges 
of cruelty. Such calumnies would, indeed, ultimately find 
their level, but we cannot make ourselves a party to carrying 
the war into the sacred sphere of private life. 
There is, of course, a surface plausibility in the notion 
that the practice of vivisedtion must render men generally 
inhuman ; but on closer examination it fades away. 
The biological experimentalist inflidts pain upon animals 
for one important end only, regarding it all the time 
as an unpleasant necessity. Where this end does not 
come into view he has no temptation to use the means. 
