He goes on to show the benefits which might accrue from this knowledge. But the Home Office entertained a different opinion, that it was not worth the most trivial infliction of pain upon a rabbit or a frog. He adds:

The absurd position has now been assumed by the State that an operation implying merely such a wound as can be produced by a needle point is not justifiable so long as it is performed for the purpose of acquiring knowledge, and of the hope of benefiting the human race.

I have been informed by a surgeon that, a certain drug having been declared a remedy for tetanus or lock-jaw, he procured some; and in order to test its power he was about first to inoculate a rabbit. But the law forbade, and his patient failed to have the benefit of the remedy.

Virchow, one of the most illustrious physicians and men of science of the day, delivered a special address at St. James's Hall on the importance of experiments on animals. He showed clearly how the charge of cruelty was a subterfuge. The real allegation was that the experimental method, yea, modern medicine altogether, is materialistic if not nihilistic in its ultimate object-that it offends against sentiment, against morals. He showed how exactly the same objection had formerly been raised against the dissection of human bodies, which was considered both disgraceful and degrading.

During the time of the Congress the statue of Harvey was unveiled at Folkestone, and it devolved upon the venerable Owen to deliver an address. He spoke of the incalculable importance of the experiments which led to the discovery of the circulation of the blood; and of those, which suggested the scientific treatment of aneurism, with consequent relief to an immense amount of human suffering.

Professor Michael Foster, of Cambridge, after his address on Physiology, concluded as follows:

At the present day careers are opening up, and a fair amount of useful work is, I trust, being done, or rather perhaps would be done, had not, in this country, physiology fallen upon evil days of a kind unknown in the eighteenth or any other century. A zeal not according to knowledge has, whatever commendable impulses may have nurtured it, given rise to legislative action which has gone far to cripple physiological research in this country. Our science has been made the subject of what the highest legal authority stated in the House of Lords to be a penal act. We are liable at any moment in our inquiries to be arrested by legal prohibitions. We are hampered by licenses and certificates. When we enter upon any research we do not know how far we may go before we have to crave permission to proceed; we sigh in our bondage like the Israelites of old; we are asked to make bricks when they have taken away from us our straw. One good fruit of the present Congress may be this, that our foreign brethren, seeing our straits, will go home determined in their respective countries to resist to the utmost all attempts to put the physiological inquirer in chains, for we surely are all agreed that experiment is the best weapon with which we can fight against the powers of darkness of the mysteries of life.

Professor Humphry, of Cambridge, speaking at the late meeting of the British Medical Association, said:

It was our duty, who know the real importance of vivisection to the advancement of our profession and the welfare of the community-it was our duty in the interest less indeed of our profession than of the general welfare of the public, that we should speak out and state what we think distinctly. The first argument raised against vivisection is-what good has it done? To one who surveys the progress of medical science from its beginning, this question seems to be scarcely possible for persons to ask. Why, the truth is that almost every advance in the knowledge of the workings of the human body has been made through vivisection. Our knowledge of the movement of the blood, our knowledge of the mode of action of the heart, and the other processes by which the circulation of the blood is effected, of the functions of the nervous system, of the functions of the brain, of the functions of the spinal cord, of every nerve which passes from the brain and spinal cord, of the influence of those nerves over every organ and structure of the body-over the heart, over the lungs, over the stomach, over the pulse, over the kidneys, over the bladder, over the skin, over the muscles-is almost entirely due to vivisection. What has been the influence of this upon medical treatment? Almost all real great advance in medical treatment has been due to better medical knowledge, and that better medical knowledge is greatly due to the advancement of physiology. Take away the knowledge which we have received through vivisection, and conceive what a chaos would be our knowledge of the human body and our ideas of the treat nent of the diseases of the human body. You can scarcely conceive to what we should be reduced. Every man in the whole history of medicine, every man who has made real advances in the knowledge of the workings of the human body, has done it through vivisection. From Galen and Vesalius to Harvey, to Hunter, to Hope, and Brodie-for this, the most practical of modern surgeons, was a vivisectorevery one of these men, and they are few among the many, has made his greatest discoveries through vivisection.

Dr. Humphry then deals with the question of the demoralisation which it may induce, speaks of the goodness of the men who practise it, of their use of chloroform, and of their care to prevent suffering in other ways. He adds:

To my mind, if there be demoralisation connected with this matter, it is the demoralisation connected with false statements and imperfect knowledge. I do not know that there is anything in the course of my life which has shaken my feelings with regard to the uprightness, the integrity, and, above all, the fairness of Englishmen, so much as the manner in which this subject of vivisection has been paraded before the public, fortified with exaggeration, with carelessness, and false statement. Certainly no demoralisation associated with vivisection is at all to be compared with the demoralisation and damage which is to be done to the minds and thoughts of the community by the statements which are made against it. It is an absolute necessity that vivisection shall be practised, just as it is necessary that dissection of the human body shall be done. If it be not done in a legitimate way, it will be done in some other way.

Thus it will be seen that all the leading men in England and in Europe those who are best capable of forming a true judgment—have expressed their opinion strongly in favour of experiments on animals, and have at the same time supported their opinion by an exposition of facts. Opposed to these savants are certain lords and certain ladies, certain bishops and certain members of Parliament, who, with all

the dogmatism of mature ignorance, declare that 'vivisection only panders to curiosity, without doing anything for science;' that it is a detestable practice not attended with scientific results.' If history repeats itself, we seem to hear the Dominican monks vociferating that the earth does not go round the sun, and to see them putting Galileo in prison to prove their point. I would ask the reader to picture to himself a platform on which Pasteur and Virchow, Owen and Huxley, Humphry and Foster, Simon and Fraser unite in the statement that the remarkable advance in medical science and art during the last twenty years is due to experiments upon the lower animals'; and immediately afterwards a sincere rural dean and a conscientious auctioneer unite with equal solemnity in stating their opinion that experiments on animals have led to no useful results.' I do not doubt their sanity, or their modesty, or their good faith: they only lack a sense of the ludicrous.

So strange does it seem that an ignorant majority should prevail over the learned few, that it may be worth while to inquire how a legislative act could have been founded on popular clamour. I think it must be admitted that the late Government was altogether misled in this matter. It acted as if those engaged in what was called vivisection were mischievous boys, or rather ruffians, who were constantly dissecting animals alive for their own amusement. If such miscreants existed, they would be the last men in the world qualified for the performance of an experiment and the appreciation of its results. Great knowledge, skill, and indefatigable devotion to duty are required for physiological research, and these qualities are not to be found in brutal natures. Indeed, those against whom the law is directed are at least as refined, as cultivated, as humane as any equal number of men to be found in the kingdom. Among them are fathers of families, instructors of youth, practical philanthropists, devout Christians. These are the men at whom the law strikes and threatens with fine and imprisonment. I remember showing a lady a most carefully arranged piece of mechanism (contrived by Professor Marey, the distinguished successor of Bernard), which indicated, by a delicate galvanic apparatus, the rate of transmission of a stimulation along a nerve. This lady, on looking at it, exclaimed, And is it possible that a man who showed so much ingenuity, perseverance, and so much insight into the importance of scientific accuracy, would have been liable in this country to be fined and imprisoned with swindlers and burglars?' The late Government lent too ready an ear to well-meaning but ill-informed fanatics and to paid agitators. A penny illustrated paper, which panders to the vilest and lowest feelings of the mob by delineating in detail all the circumstances of brutal crimes, did good service to the anti-vivisectionists by its false and abominable prints. That pain must sometimes be inflicted by experiments I admit; but in many cases

it is literally as trifling as the prick of a pin, and in the great majority of cases more severe experiments are rendered painless by the use of anesthetics. I believe the words of Dr. Pye Smith in his address before the British Association in 1879 convey the spirit of all scientific men in England. He says:

The only restriction which Christian morality imposes upon such practices is that no more pain shall be inflicted than is necessary for the object in view. Killing or hurting domestic animals when moved by passion or by the horrible delight which some depraved natures feel in the act of inflicting pain was until lately the only recognised transgression against the law of England. It is only under such restrictions that physiologists desire to work. They are, in fact, the very limits that were accepted by physiologists long before the agitation began. Any one who would inflict a single pang beyond what is necessary for a scientific object, or would by carelessness fail to take due care of the animals he has to deal with, would be justly liable to public reprobation.

2

I do not pretend to speak for physiologists, but I apprehend that they would deprecate as much as anybody the practice of experiments by untrained and incompetent persons; they would regard it as a public scandal if, in any house in any street, animals were liable to be made use of for experimentation. It is not likely that this would ever occur; but, to satisfy public feeling, I have no doubt that no physiologist would object to his laboratory being licensed in the same way as are dissecting-rooms under the Anatomy Act, and to the license being given only to persons of adequate knowledge and known character. When this was done, the expert should be allowed to work in his own way and after his own method. I have little doubt that this would be acceptable to physiologists, and ought sufficiently to appease the public mind; for it should be remembered, as Lord Sherbrooke well put it, that some of these experimenters are practising physicians and surgeons; and it is absurd to trust defenceless children in their hands, and forbid them performing vaccination on a mouse.

There is an important part of the question which has not been sufficiently dwelt upon by physiologists. They have defended their cause by showing the benefits which have accrued from experiments on animals. All they have said is perfectly true; but it must be remembered that these good results were not immediately in view, nor were they always the chief object for which the physiologist performed his experiment. Every fact in nature, being of necessity the exemplification of a general law, has its meaning; and thus the most important consequences have resulted from an observation of the most trivial phenomena. Illustrations of this truth abound in every chapter of the history of science. It is, therefore, only the single object before him at which the experimenter is aiming he is seeking after truth, and if he finds it he is satisfied. Indeed, the true 2 See Report of the British Association for the Advancement of Science, 1871, p. 144.

scientific worker is known by the singleness of his purpose, for it is certain that if he is looking to some splendid ulterior object his eyes become dazzled and he misses his mark. How absurd, then, for experimenters to be asked by the Government official before he permits them to commence their work, what good object they can foresee in pursuing their researches! The only answer which a really scientific man could give would be-knowledge.

Although this feeling is quite unappreciated by many persons, the perusal of the biographies of great scientific men shows that they were impelled by as strong a passion as any in the human breast. We know, if a lad has a passion for music or painting, that no penalties which it would be in our power to inflict would prevent him in secret or in bye paths from following his constraining passion. So it is with the thirst for knowledge; it cannot be restrained. The naturalist will wander in the pathless forest to discover some new form of life, or he will watch for hours over the fertilising process in his flowers, or the habits of his ants, or the slow operation of the worms in the earth. An enthusiastic medical student will watch all night at the bedside of a sick man in the hospital; not only when impelled by duty to minister to his wants, but also when impelled by the thirst for knowledge to watch the ever-changing symptoms of some mysterious malady. It therefore manifests a lamentable want of knowledge of mankind in our governing bodies to think that an Act of Parliament can eventually arrest scientific research; it may hamper and harass for a time, but it is powerless to do more.

As there will always be certain men engaged in the cultivation of the fine arts or of letters, so there will be others engaged in unravelling the enigmas of nature; and it should be thoroughly and clearly understood that this can only be done by one method-by experiment and proof. The mysteries of nature are not to be understood by looking at them; in all ages and all times this has been done, but without profit. If it had been possible at any former period for a superior intelligence to have endeavoured an explanation of the growth of a plant, of the causes of animal heat, or the laws of nervous conduction, the very terms would have been unintelligible; the description of the tissues now known to the microscopist, the various chemical changes, the electric currents, would have sounded as jargon. All knowledge is self-created; it comes step by step through experiment and verification: this knowledge, when obtained, is then made use of in explanation of the more complex structures and phenomena. Just as the steam engine has been built up step by step through a series of years, so is our knowledge a continuous growth after the same fashion. If there be, then, a particular process which alone the human mind can make use of for the investigation of the phenomena of nature, there will always be found certain