EXPERIMENTS ON ANIMALS. 
9 
necessary with the virus in different stages of cultivation (attenu¬ 
ation) to determine when the virulent properties disappeared. 
The anti-vivisectionists tell us that all the results'of experiments 
on animals could have been obtained by a hundred different and 
better methods than by vivisection. In what one other way 
could we have learned these facts but by experiment ? It is un¬ 
fortunately true that the diseases over which we have acquired 
such power are but few in number; but the list is a long and 
rapidly growing one in which we are gradually gaining this mas¬ 
tery over disease. Will it facilitate our progress to obstruct us 
in the one way in which any valuable results have been obtained ? 
Let me give you one or two illustrations of the truth of this. 
Anthrax * or splenic fever, known in France as charbon, and 
in Germany as milzbrand, is one of the most widespread and 
fatal scourges to which animals, whether in a state of nature or 
domestication, are liable. It decimates the reindeer herds in the 
polar regions, and the herds in the tropics, and affects the care¬ 
fully tended herds of the most highly civilized countries equally 
with the wandering herds and flocks of the Mongol steppes. In 
fact there is scarcely a region in the entire world where anthrax 
is unknown. And its antiquity is as great as its distribution is 
wide. It is described as one of the scourges inflicted on the 
Egyptians, and Virgil has shown its deadliness and contagion, 
and alludes to the dangers of the tainted fleeces to mankind, con¬ 
firming what is now know as to the origin of woolsorter’s disease. 
But through all this time, and in spite of the innumerable vol¬ 
umes and treatises written on this subject, no progress was made 
in its prevention or cure until its cause was isolated, and the 
means of its prevention discovered by experiments upon animals. 
It has now lost all its terrors and we may hope that it will ulti¬ 
mately be eradicated from all civilized quarters of the globe. 
The general public cares nothing for any scientific truth for 
its own sake, but only for the so-called practical benefits to be 
derived therefrom. And it is well known that men are proverbi- 
*See article on Vivisection, by G. Fleming, in Nineteenth Century , March, 
1882 , from which part of the following data were obtained. 
