G88 
VIVISI-CTION NO CUULLTY. 
recent publications in the three departments of experimental 
])hysijology—structural and comparative anatomy, and the 
microscope. The only part of the address, liowever, in 
which the general public will take much interest referred to 
the practice of vivisection, which has lately been discussed 
in the columns of the London papers, and which, says the 
Thnes in certain cases the learned professor, rather luke¬ 
warmly, it must be confessed, attempted to defend. With 
not very faultless logic, he concluded that it could not be 
cruel, because cruelty was only committed by ignorant, un¬ 
cultivated people, such as children, gamekeepers, and the 
lower orders generally, and of course ])hysiologists who 
])ractise vivisection are a highly cultivated class. Cruelty, 
lie said, usually flowed from want of thought, want of cul¬ 
ture, and want of refinement; but was it probable that men 
of a science demanding much thought, some culture, and not 
a little education, should resemble persons lacking all these 
things in the very points most directly characteristic of sucii 
deficiencies? Having proved to his satisfaction that the 
practice was not cruel, the learned professor next proceeded 
to show that it could hardly be said to exist. Experiments 
on living animals, he said, very frequently caused their death 
instantaneously; and when this was not the case, chloroform 
\vas almost invariably employed. In vivisection, as it was 
called, frequently the first step was the destruction of life, 
and that in a way as speedy, to say the least, as by the ordi¬ 
nary methods of destruction at the command of either the 
sportsman or the butcher. Surel}^ a life might as well be 
sacrificed for increasing knowledge as for the production of 
flesh food, or for what was called sport. Experiment, too, 
was tedious and toilsome, and was, therefore, rarely under¬ 
taken out of wantonness or for the gratification of malignity. 
Undertaken for the ends of science, it had as good a claim 
to our sympathy as the practices of the ‘‘gentle craft^^ of 
anglers, to say nothing of those of the destroyers of warm¬ 
blooded animals. Ultimately the professor conceded that 
vivisection, in the strict sense of the word, was practised 
without the exhibition of chloroform where the question at 
issue had reference to the nerves, and he defended it here by 
referring to its utility in the cases of the two frightful dis¬ 
eases, epilepsy and diabetes. The former, frightful to 
witness, was yet more frightful to sutler—violence and danger 
for the moment, and dreariness of prospect for the future; 
and of the way to meet it vivisection had given us a hopeful 
foreshadowing. To diabetes—an equally terrible if less 
shocking malady—the applicability of viviscctional results 
