VIVISECTIONS. 
219 
is the diligent student of the animals under his care. He ‘ regardeth their 
life/—its unfathomable sources, its manifold operation. He imitates the 
ancient poet and moralist of Edom, as he exclaims, amidst the devout con¬ 
templation of the teeming opulence of this life, c Ask now the beasts and 
they shall teach thee, and the fowls of the air and they shall tell thee, .... 
and the fishes of the sea shall declare unto thee ; who in all these knoweth not 
that Jehovah made them, in Whose hand is the soul of every living thing.” 
VIVISECTION IN FRANCE. 
From Mr. Goodwin, M.R.C.S., Veterinary Surgeon at Hampton Court 
Palace, dated January 15th, 1861: 
ct To the Editor of Bell’s Life in London. 
“ Sir, —I call your serious attention to the excellent letter of Sir John 
Scott Lillie, for it really behoves every man to make an effort to put a stop 
to the most outrageous cruelties perpetrated in auy country. In my time 
I have performed, and assisted others in performing, every kind of operation 
that a veterinary surgeon can be called upon to undertake, but I did not 
acquire the knowledge which led me to perform them successfully by butch¬ 
ering living animals. It is sickening to reflect upon the torture of some 
poor old horse, bound and helpless, moaning and groaning under the cuts 
and thrusts of the knife into every sensitive part of his body by some untu¬ 
tored wretch in the shape of a student. Fortunately, here, for our poor 
patients, in all operations we subject them to, it is our study to render their 
pangs as transitory as possible. 
“ Surely the influence of the Count de Horny and of the members of the 
French Jockey Club might be exercised to bring before the Emperor bar¬ 
barities which are disgraceful to the inhabitants of a civilised nation. For 
many years I witnessed most of the operations performed in our metropolitan 
hospitals before chloroform was employed, and in my connection with the 
first surgeons of the day I never heard of one practising upon living animals 
to learn to operate—their dexterity was acquired in the dissecting-room upon 
the bodies of the dead. It is a very general opinion that, to be a good 
surgeon, or rather a good operator, one must not have too sensitive feelings ; 
for myself, I can say that, familiarised as I have been with operations on 
man and horse of every description, I shudder to think of the sufferings of 
an animal under living dissection.” 
In addition to the evidence adduced in the foregoing Appendix against the 
practice of vivisection, this Committee might refer to certain passages in the 
Report of the Paris Commission, to prove the necessity of legal powers to 
interdict, at all events, the abuses of that practice. That passage for in¬ 
stance in which it is stated with reference to “ its alleged benefits to man¬ 
kind :” 
“ But to deserve this approbation, the science of vivisection must be 
strictly maintained within the limits of this noble aim. It must be regarded 
solely as the means of verifying by experiment a hypothesis circumscribed 
beforehand, so as to limit the sufferings of the living creature upon whom 
they are necessarily imposed, to the bare research of the solution of the 
difficulty under consideration. Beyond such limits, the question of cruelty 
begins, inasmuch as it is at this point that commences the gratuitous 
infliction of pain, the absence of utility. Vivisection can only be exercised 
with morality when its object is the pursuit of new discoveries, of course, in 
the silence and solitude of the laboratory, aud under those certain conditions 
