INAUGURAL ADDRESS. 
643 
form one of a deputation to proceed to Paris, there to 
co-operate with a French society having similar objects, for 
the purpose of endeavouring to put an end to the horrid and 
revolting barbarities of vivisection, which are practised day 
after day in the veterinary schools of Alfort and Lyons. 
There, in these temples for the alleviation of animal suffering, 
for the scientific evolution of pity into good works—there, 
in the wide pleasure-places of an Emperor, who is the eldest 
son of the Church, and whose will rushes with succouring 
thousands to the bleeding Christianity of Syria—there twice 
a week is cruelty, under the hypocritical mask of science, 
perpetrated to an extent which is almost without a parallel 
in the history of this planet. A stream of blood seems to 
run from these places over the whole veterinary profession 
of France, and ill comports with their mission as ministers 
of the healing art. 
The facts are these : at Alfort, which I visited, and still 
more I hear at Lyons, the pupils are instructed in surgery 
by cutting up ‘living horses ! Oh, then, is surgery fiend- 
hood? Two days a week, at nine o’clock in the morning, the 
doomed horse is cast; and then he is subjected to all sorts 
of surgical operations, such as firing, neurotomy, cutting 
away pieces of the cartilage of the foot, operating as for 
stone in the bladder, extirpating the parotid and other 
glands, or the eyes, or any organ that forceps can pull, or 
that knives and saws can reach. Steel and fingers, guided 
by stony hearts, invade the poor animal at all points. 
These operations on the same horse last from nine o’clock 
in the morning until four in the afternoon; unless, indeed, 
he becomes unfit for the diabolism by dying in the mean 
time. Now, that is what we went over to France to expostu¬ 
late against. I fear, however, that our deputation made but 
slight progress towards effecting what I think you will all 
admit was, on the part of the society, a most benevolent 
object. To talk of the necessity of these horrors for the 
purpose of teaching surgery is, I contend, utterly absurd. 
Here, I am bold to say, we can operate when it is needful 
quite equal to the French veterinarian, though we have not 
learnt the art by these direful practices. Our human sur¬ 
geons, too, are many of them men of consummate skill, 
though they have not learnt it by cutting and slashing living 
human beings. The same, indeed, may be said of human 
surgeons all over the civilized world; and yet if there is any 
necessity for it in one, surely there is the same necessity 
in the other. There is not, in fact, a pretext for these acts, 
but they stand revealed as naked fiendhood; and I hesitate 
