THE JANUS OF SCIENCE 
 
 Reprinted by Permission from the Article Entitled 
 
 " VIVISECTION AND ITS TWO-FACED ADVOCATES," 
 
 In the " Contemporary Review," April, 1882. 
 
 FRANCES POWER COBBE. 
 
 OFFICE OF THE SOCIETY FOR 
 
 PROTECTION OF ANIMALS FROM VIVISECTION, 
 
 i, VICTORIA STREET, S.W. 
 
 1882. 
 
 PRICE THREEPENCE. 
 

 London : 
 
 Printed by Pewtress & Co., 
 
 15, Great Queen Street, Lincoln's Inn Fields, W.C. 
 
E E H A T U M . 
 
 Pasfe 5> line 
 
 12 & I3j 
 
 j? or Lauder Brunton, &c. 
 
 r^a<i Professor Gerald Yeo. 
 
 Fortnightly Review. 
 

THE JANUS OF SCIENCE. 
 
 The position in which we, the opponents of Vivisection, 
 find ourselves at present is this : — 
 
 We seek to stop certain practices which appear to us to 
 involve gross cruelty, and to be contrary to the spirit of 
 English law. Our knowledge of them is derived almost 
 exclusively from the published reports and treatises prepared 
 and issued by the actual individuals who carry out those 
 practices ; and our arguments are grounded upon verbatim 
 citations from those published reports and treatises.* 
 
 The persons whose practices we desire to stop, and their 
 immediate associates, now meet our charges of cruelty by 
 articles in the leading periodicals, wherein the proceedings in 
 question are invested with a character not only diverse from, 
 but opposite to, that which they wear in the scientific treatises 
 and reports above-mentioned. 
 
 * E.g., the " Handbook of the Physiological Laboratory," by Drs. 
 Burdon-Sanderson, Lauder-Brunton, Klein, and Foster, London, 1873 ; 
 Beclard's "Traite Elementaire," Paris, 1880 ; Claude Bernard's 
 " Physiologie Operatoire," " Traite sur le Diabete," and " Sur la Chaleur 
 Animale;" Cyon's " Methodik," Giessen ; Paul Bert's "La Pression 
 Barometrique, Paris, 1878 ; Mantegazza's " Del Dolore," Florence, 1880 ; 
 Livon's " Manuel de Vivisections," 1882 ; Archives de Physiologic, edited by 
 Brown-Sequard, Charcot, and Vulpian : SchifPs" Fisiologia Esperimentale," 
 1866; "Pharmacology and Therapeutics," by Dr. Lauder-Brunton, 1SS0 ; 
 Transactions of the Royal Society, 1875; Journal of Physiology, Michael 
 Foster, 1882 ; Goltz' " Verrichtungen des Grosshirns," 1S81. 
 
I shall, in this paper, endeavour to indicate the outlines of 
 these diversities and contradictions, premising that, from the 
 nature of the case, the argument is a cumulative one, of 
 which the full force can only be felt by those who have actually 
 perused the treatises and experienced the impression which 
 -they are calculated to produce. Afterwards, I shall deal with 
 some subordinate matters respecting which my statements in 
 a previous article (in the Fortnightly Review) have been 
 called in question. 
 
 1. In the first place, the purpose of the great majority of 
 experiments is differently described in the scientific treatises 
 and in the popular articles. In the former, the raison d'etre of 
 most experiments appears to be the elucidation of points of 
 purely scientific interest. It is only occasionally that we meet 
 with allusions to diseases or their remedies, but the experi- 
 ments are generally described as showing that one organ acts 
 in one way and another in another ; that such a lesion, or 
 such an irritation, produces such and such results and react- 
 ions ; and (especially) that Professor A.'s theory has been 
 disproved and that of Professor B. (temporarily) established. 
 In short, every page of these books corroborates the honest 
 statement of Professor Hermann of Zurich : " The advance- 
 ment of science, and not practical utility to medicine, is the 
 true and straightforward object of all vivisection. No true 
 investigator in his researches thinks of the practical utilization. 
 Science can afford to despise this justification with which 
 vivisection has been defended in England." — Die Vivisec- 
 tion sf rage, p. 1 6. 
 
 We now turn to such articles as the six which have 
 appeared in the Nineteenth Century and the two in the Fort- 
 nightly Review in defence of vivisection, and, mirabile dictu ! 
 not a solitary vivisection is mentioned of which the direct 
 advancement of the Healing Art does not appear as the 
 single-minded object. 
 
 2. Again, the severity of the experiments in common use, 
 
appears from the Treatises and Reports (always including the 
 English " Handbook," Transactions, and Journal of Physiology) 
 to be truly frightful. Sawing across the backbone, dissecting 
 out and irritating all the great nerves, driving catheters 
 along the veins and arteries, inoculating with the most 
 dreadful diseases, cutting out pieces of the intestine, baking, 
 stewing, pouring boiling water into the stomach, freezing to 
 death, reducing the brain to the condition of a " lately- 
 hoed potato field ; " these and similarly terrible experiments 
 form the staple of some of them, and a significant feature in 
 all. 
 
 But turning now to the popular articles, we find Dr. Lauder 
 Brunton assuring the readers of the Nineteenth Century that 
 " he has calculated that about twenty-four out of every ioo of 
 the experiments (in the Parliamentary Returns), might have 
 given pain. But of these twenty-four, four-fifths are like 
 vaccination, the pain of which is of no great moment. In 
 about one-seventh of the cases the animal only suffered from 
 the healing of a wound." Sir James Paget afforded us- a still 
 more couleur de rose view of the subject. He said : " I believe 
 that, with these few exceptions, there are no physiological 
 experiments which are not matched or far surpassed in pain- 
 fulness by common practices permitted or encouraged by the 
 most humane persons." 
 
 3. Again, as regards the feelings of the vivisectors, in reading 
 these terrible Treatises we do not meet with one solitary 
 appeal against the repetition of painful experiments, one 
 caution to the student to forbear from the extremity of 
 torture, one expression of pity or regret — even when the 
 keenest suffering had been inflicted. On the contrary, we 
 find frequent repetitions of such phrases as " interesting 
 experiments," " very interesting experiments," " beautiful " 
 (schone) cerebral inflammation, and so on. In short, the 
 writers, frankly, seem pleased with their work, and exemplify 
 Claude Bernard's description of the ideal Vivisector— the man 
 
who " does not hear the animal's cries of pain, and is blind to 
 the blood that flows, and who sees nothing but his idea and 
 organisms which conceal from him the secrets he is resolved 
 to discover. "* Or still more advanced, they realized 
 Cyon's yet stronger picture in his great book of the 
 " Methodik," of which, by the way, he has lately told us in 
 the Gaulois, that when the book was coming out his 
 English colleagues implored him not to allow it to be 
 advertised in England. 
 
 In this most important treatise M. Cyon tells us : — 
 
 " The true vivisector must approach a difficult vivisection 
 with joyful excitement. . . . He who shrinks from cutting 
 into a living animal, he who approaches a vivisection as a 
 disagreeable necessity, may be able to repeat one or two vivi- 
 sections, but he will never be an artist in vivisection. . . . 
 The sensation of the physiologist when, from a gruesome 
 wound, full of blood and mangled tissue, he draws forth some 
 delicate nerve thread. . . . has much in common with 
 that of a sculptor." — Methodik, p. 15. 
 
 This is the somewhat startling self-revelation of the 
 Vivisector, made by himself to his colleagues. The picture of 
 him in the Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly Review is almost 
 as different as one face of Janus from the other. We find him 
 talking of the power of " controlling one's emotions," " dis- 
 regarding one's own feelings at the sight of suffering," 
 "subordinating feeling to judgment," and much more in the 
 same strain, whereby the Vivisector is made to appear a 
 tender-hearted martyr to the Enthusiasm of Humanity. 
 
 4. Again, as to the number of animals dissected alive, the 
 Treatises make us suppose it to be enormous. M. Paul Bert 
 gives cases of terrible experiments on dogs placed under the 
 compression of eight atmospheres and coming out stiffened, 
 " so that the animal may be carried by one paw just as a 
 
 * " Introduction a l'Etude de la Medecine Experimentale," p. 180. 
 
piece of wood " — and on cats which, when dissected after death, 
 showed a " marrow which flowed like cream ; " and of these 
 experiments he gives the public instances up to No. 286. 
 Schiff is calculated to have " used " 14,000 dogs and nearly 
 50,000 other animals during his ten years' work in Florence. 
 Flourens told Blatin that Magendie had sacrificed 4,000 dogs 
 to prove Bell's theory of the nerves, and 4,000 more to disprove 
 the same ; and that he, Flourens, had proved Bell was right 
 by sacrificing some thousand more. Dr. Lauder-Brunton 
 himself told the Royal Commission (Q. 5,721) that in one 
 series, out of three on one subject, he had sacrificed (without 
 result) ninety cats in an experiment during which they 
 lingered four or five hours after the chloroform (Q. 5,724), 
 with their intestines "operated upon." He also carried 
 on another series of 150 experiments on various animals, 
 very painful, and notoriously without results (Q. 5,748). 
 This is the scale on which vivisections abroad and at 
 home are carried on, if we are to be guided by the 
 Treatises. 
 
 Turn we now to the popular Articles ; and we find men- 
 tion only of the very smallest numbers. Sir William Gull 
 minimizes Bernard's stove-baked dogs to six (concerning the 
 correction of which statement, see further, p. 13), and Pro- 
 fessor Yeo brings down those of Professor Rutherford's 
 victims to twelve (for which also see p. 21) every reference 
 to numbers being apparently, like those of the Fuegians, 
 limited to the digits of physiologists. 
 
 5. Again, as regards Anesthetics, throughout the Treatises 
 I cannot recall having once seen them mentioned as means of 
 allaying the sufferings of the animals, but very often as convenient 
 applications for keeping them quiet. Claude Bernard in his 
 " Physiologie Operatoire," and Cyon in his great " Methodik," 
 each devote a section to them as means of restraint (" con- 
 tention"), and describe their merits from that point of view. 
 Morphia, for example, Bernard recommends because it keeps 
 
8 
 
 the animal still, though " il souffre la douleur ;" and of curare 
 (which, he says, causes " the most atrocious sufferings which 
 the imagination can conceive"), he remarks, without an 
 expression of regret, that its use in vivisection is so universal 
 that it may always be assumed to have been used in experi- 
 ments not otherwise described. Nor can haste explain this 
 omission to treat anaesthetics from the humanitarian point of 
 view, for the Treatises contain long chapters of advice to the 
 neophyte in vivisection, how he may ingeniously avoid being 
 bitten by the dogs, or scratched by the yet more "terrible" 
 cats, which are, Bernard pathetically complains, "indocile" 
 when lifted on the torture trough. 
 
 Turning to our Nineteenth Century essayists, we find chloro- 
 form is everywhere, and curare nowhere. 
 
 6. Lastly, there is not a trace in the Treatises — even in 
 the English "Handbook" — of the supposed Wall of China 
 which guards the Flowery Land of English Vivisection from 
 the hordes of outer barbarians who practise in Paris, 
 Leipsic, Florence, Strasbourg, and Vienna. We find, on the 
 contrary, a frequent and cordial interchange of experiments 
 and compliments. Our English vivisectionists study in the 
 schools of the Continent, and in several cases have brought 
 over foreigners to be their assistants at home. When Claude 
 Bernard died, so little did English physiologists think of repu- 
 diating him, that a letter appeared in the Times of March 20, 
 1878, inviting subscriptions to raise a monument to his 
 honour, signed by Sir James Paget, Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, 
 Professor Humphry, Professor Gerald Yeo, Mr. Ernest 
 Hart, Mr. Romanes, and Dr. Michael Foster. Even last 
 autumn, when Professors Goltz, Flint, Brown-Sequard, 
 Beclard, and Chauveau joined the International Congress in 
 London, they were received with the warmest welcome from 
 their English colleagues, one hundred of whom accompanied 
 Professors Goltz and Ferrier to inspect the dogs of the former 
 and the monkeys of the latter (I beg pardon, of Professor 
 
Yeo) ; and when Professor Goltz returned to Germany, he 
 published a volume containing beautiful coloured pictures 
 of the mutilated brains of his dogs, and dedicated it — to 
 whom does the reader think ? To — 
 
 "HIS ENGLISH FRIENDS !"* 
 
 All this does not look exactly like hearty disgust and repudia- 
 tion of the foreign system. 
 
 But turn we to the Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly Review, 
 and lo ! the garments of our English physiologists are drawn 
 closely around them, and we are assured they have " no con- 
 nection whatever with the establishment over the way." I 
 am even rebuked for placing on the same page (in my article 
 " Four replies ") certain English experiments and " the dis- 
 gusting details of foreign atrocities, which excite a persistent 
 feeling of repugnance." Professor Yeo says he " regards 
 with pain and loathing such work as that of Mantegazza," 
 and asks me bitterly, " Why repeat the oft-told tale of 
 horrors contained in the works of Claude Bernard, Paul 
 Bert, Brown-Sequard, and Richet in France, of Goltz 
 in Germany, Mantegazza in Italy, and Flint in America ?" 
 (p. 361.) 
 
 Surely this is a cargo of Jonahs thrown overboard together ! 
 Claude Bernard, the prince of physiologists, to whom this 
 same professor Gerald Yeo, four years ago, wished to raise a 
 statue ! Brown-Sequard, the honoured of Professor Huxley ! 
 Professor Flint, who, six months since, was the favoured 
 guest of every scientific throng in London, and who, I pre- 
 sume, is of Anglo-Saxon race, only corrupted from humane 
 British vivisection by evil American communications ! And 
 lastly, Goltz ! — poor Professor Goltz, who had so many 
 cordial hand-shakes on quitting perfidious Albion, while the 
 autumn leaves were falling, and who is now flung down the 
 Gemonian stairs, a sacrifice to the rabble of anti-vivi- 
 
 * " Verrichtungen des Grosshirns," 1881. 
 
IO 
 
 sectors even while the ink is scarcely dry on his touching 
 dedication of his book : — 
 
 " SEINEN 
 FREUNDEN IN ENGLAND 
 
 GEWIDMET 
 VON DEM VERFASSER." 
 
 May not this new Raleigh fitly cry, not, " O the friendship of 
 Princes !" but " O the friendship of Physiologists ?" 
 
 Thus we see that, as regards, first, the purpose of the 
 majority of vivisections ; second, their severity; third, their 
 number; fourth, the feelings of the experimenters; fifth, the 
 use of anesthetics ; sixth, the difference between English and 
 foreign vivisection, — in short, on every one of the points of 
 importance in the controversy, — there is contradiction on the 
 broadest scale between the scientific Treatises and Reports 
 prepared for " brethren of the craft " and the Articles 
 written in lay periodicals for the edification of the British 
 public. 
 
 It is for the reader to judge which class of statement may, 
 with the greater probability, be held to represent the genuine 
 doings and feelings of the writers. 
 
 I now proceed to examine some of the minor points whereon 
 my statements in the Fortnightly Review for January have been 
 attacked by the writers in the Nineteenth Century and Fortnightly 
 Review for March. 
 
 Sir William Gull is, no doubt, a great authority on drugs 
 and diseases.* Perhaps for that reason he has scarcely 
 devoted much leisure to the study of morals and divinity. 
 Had he done so he would scarcely have asked, "What casuist 
 can doubt the moral duty (of pressing on the acquisition of 
 
 * Sir William Gull told the Royal Commission, however (Q. 5,545), when 
 asked " As regards remedial drugs, are there many which you can enumerate 
 as having been discovered by those processes ? (vivisections)," " I am 
 sorry to say that I am not a great believer in drugs." 
 
II 
 
 knowledge), with the parable of the Talents before him ?" 
 The casuist is, I think, yet to be found who will maintain that 
 the pursuit of knowledge is not morally limited, like every 
 other human pursuit, by the lawfulness of the means to be 
 therein employed ; and certainly our fashionable physician 
 stands alone in an interpretation of the Gospel parable which 
 would represent the Teacher as recommending the man with 
 five talents to increase them — let us say, by knocking down 
 and robbing the man with one. As Sir William Gull has' 
 however, begun the study of the Bible, I may point out to him 
 that in the opening chapters of Genesis he will find the ruin 
 of the whole human race attributed to " the acquisition of 
 knowledge " regardless of lawful limitation. 
 
 The experience of six years has convinced most of us that 
 to argue a point of animal suffering with a vivisector is not a 
 very hopeful proceeding. There is one matter, however, 
 wherein, as he seems to refer to me, I shall try to convict Sir 
 W. Gull. He ridicules my expression of " baking alive," 
 applied to the dogs in Bernard's stove, and through a page 
 and a half he labours to explain that the sufferings of 
 Bernard's victims were only those of a man dying of fever. 
 " The animal — or man," he says, " is under such circumstances 
 (those of fever) baked alive " — and he leaves the impression 
 that in his opinion the pain of the stove and the pain of the 
 fever were equal. Here is what a physiologist of a different 
 school wrote recently in the Spectator, respecting similar 
 observations made by Mr. Edmund Gurney in the Comhill 
 Magazine : — 
 
 " In the baking experiments, of which Mr. Gurney states a 
 great deal has been made, according to him ' the actual mode 
 of death was not exceptionally painful,' in proof of which he 
 states that ' the stages of death were faintness and exhaustion, 
 passing on to coma, and, finally some convulsive movements.' 
 Now, Mr. Gurney, being a layman, may be excused when, 
 misguided perhaps by some friendly vivisector, he comes to 
 
12 
 
 the incredible conclusion that death by baking is not excep- 
 tionally painful ; but he ought, at the very least, to have taken 
 the opinion or description of the experimenter who performed 
 the experiments, to whom full reference was given. As he has 
 failed to do so, I shall supply the quotation in question from 
 Claude Bernard, in ' La Chaleiir Animale,' Paris, 1876, page 
 356 : — ' When the animal feels the toxic effects of the heat, it 
 presents a series of symptoms which are constant and 
 characteristic. At first, it is somewhat agitated ; soon 
 respiration and circulation become accelerated ; the animal 
 gasps, it pants, at last it falls into convulsions, and with a 
 scream (poussant tin cri), it generally dies suddenly.' 
 
 " Surely Mr. Gurney does not mean to quibble over the terms 
 ' boiling alive ' and ' baking alive.' As far as the experiments 
 are concerned, where the animals were placed till they died 
 in a little oven over a fire (of which a woodcut, reproduced by 
 photography, of the original, in he. cit., page 347, generally 
 accompanies the textual descriptions), no other term could 
 possibly be applied than ' baking alive.' " — Spectator, Feb. n, 
 1S82. 
 
 In short, if for " stove " we substitute " oven," we shall be 
 in a position to give an answer to the simple questions— 
 1. Is the pain of fever (such as many of us have endured for 
 three weeks, and recovered afterwards) equivalent to the pain 
 of being put into a machine at such a temperature as that we 
 should die in a few minutes ? 2. Ought a living rabbit inside 
 such a machine to be described by a different word from a 
 dead rabbit put into it and taken out after a few minutes 
 longer, fit to he eaten ? 
 
 I am content now to leave this point, which is a sample of the 
 general treatment of our charges by the advocates of vivisec- 
 tion ; but before dismissing Sir W, Gull, I must express my 
 amazement that he should have quitted the safe field of vague 
 denial and suggestion, and committed himself to a matter of 
 definite numbers, whereon his readers need only use their eyes 
 
J 3 
 
 on a visit to the Victoria Street Society's Library, to see that 
 he has made a statement — as an Italian would politely say, 
 pienamente inesatto. Sir William says (pp. 460, 461), " Bernard, 
 in these (stove) experiments, sacrificed two pigeons, two 
 guinea pigs, less than twenty rabbits, and six dogs." Where 
 did he find this number " six ? " I have before me Claude 
 Bernard's own book, wherein the disputed experiments are 
 detailed, and diagrams of the stoves inserted (pp. 347 et seq. 
 to pp. 358, 359) ; two pages are occupied by a synoptical table 
 of the experiments which were performed in the first and 
 simplest stove or oven, with the diagram of which many of 
 my readers are no doubt familiar. In this table I read in one 
 column the word " chien " three times, then eleven times, and 
 then twice. Only one of these dogs is said to have survived 
 having been withdrawn, after thirty-six seconds only of the 
 stove. Another, which was also withdrawn, died in four 
 hours. 
 
 If Sir William Gull finds that 3 + 11+2 amount to 6, 
 I shall venture to offer him a copy of Colenso's Arithmetic, 
 out of consideration for his patients, to whom his peculiar 
 views of the First Rule might prove of importance in a 
 prescription for physic. 
 
 Of the second stove or oven, of which Bernard gives a 
 diagram in his next chapter, and in which another series of 
 dogs and other animals were baked, Sir William Gull takes 
 no notice at all. From his triumphant conclusion respecting 
 the results of the martyrdom of the " six " dogs, the unwary 
 reader might suppose that we had quite got to the bottom of 
 the mystery of fever. To those who have lost their nearest 
 and dearest by such disease, there must be something ineffably 
 tantalising in these perpetual boastings — while we are all the 
 time precisely where we were ; and I confess to being, for my 
 own part, just a little sick of these Hopes which (it has been 
 remarked) "spring eternal in the physiological, as in the 
 human, breast." She is, I think, somewhat of an impostor 
 
this " Hope " of Science — who leans not on an anchor, but 
 against a vivisecting trough, and whom her traditionary 
 sisters, Faith and Charity, would certainly hasten to repudiate. 
 The references to this Hope in every page of every defence of 
 vivisection call to mind the story of Sir Boyle Roche in the 
 Dublin Parliament, when he maintained that the Union with 
 England had brought uncounted, but not easily defined, 
 benefits to Ireland. " Honourable gentlemen," said Sir 
 Boyle, with Hibernian eloquence, "may titter, but when the 
 Day of Judgment comes they will see the good the Union has 
 done to Ireland."' Just so. And when the Day of Judgment 
 comes — scarcely sooner — we shall look for the promised cure 
 of fever and cholera, cancer and consumption by means of 
 vivisection. 
 
 Sir William does not conclude without again parading 
 his singular ignorance of the rudiments of ethics. Quite 
 calmly he enounces the astounding canon : " Our obliga- 
 tions to the lower creatures arise out of ourselves. We 
 owe it to ourselves that we should treat them with tender- 
 ness." The Catholic doctrine, that we owe it to God 
 to be kind to His creatures, exhibits one side of the 
 truth. The doctrine of the intuitionalist Butler, and the 
 utilitarian Bentham, that we owe to every sentient creature 
 to spare it pain, simply because it is sentient, sets forth the 
 larger truth. But the doctrine of Sir William Gull, that duty 
 to the lower animals is exclusively a personal duty (like truth, 
 temperance, and chastity), seems to reveal incomprehension 
 of the very alphabet of morals. There is however just one 
 thing which the great teachers of physical science deem beneath 
 their notice. It is that science which deals with the noblest 
 part of the noblest creature. The ganglion of a worm or the 
 egg of a maggot is in their eyes more interesting than the 
 heart of a poet or the conscience of a saint. 
 
 In the second essay in the Nineteenth Century, the writer, 
 
15 
 
 Mr. Fleming, mentions with entire satisfaction (heightened 
 by the usual condiment of Hope) various successful experi- 
 ments of inoculation of rabies, tuberculosis, glanders (applied 
 to a " worthless " horse), and of anthrax. 
 
 Into the interminable controversy respecting vaccination in^ 
 all its forms, and the justice of the paeans over "cultivated 
 virus" (delightful phrase!), which have been ringing in our 
 ears this winter, it would be idle here to speak. I note that 
 already there are signs of a return to a comparatively reason- 
 able frame of the scientific mind, noticeable particularly in a 
 report published in Dr. Lauder-Brunton's journal, the 
 Practitioner, for March, of experiments made in Hungary in 
 correction of those of Pasteur. The Commissioners sent 
 by the Minister of Agriculture say that they " cannot 
 overlook the fact that after the protective inoculations, the 
 deaths from other diseases, or more correctly those in which the 
 post-mortem appearances were those of catarrh, pneumonia, 
 distoma, strongylus, and pericarditis, and not those of anthrax, 
 occurred exclusively among the inoculated animals" (p. 233). 
 They add that " there are still several doubts about the 
 method from a public health point of view," and that " of 
 great importance is the question whether the meat, milk, &c, 
 of inoculated animals can convey anthrax." After referring 
 to the inconceivable multiplication of disease germs in living 
 and dead animals which would follow the extensive use of 
 inoculation — germs which "might regain their original 
 virulence, and in this roundabout way affect men and other 
 animals" — the committee conclude that the "immediate 
 general application of Pasteur's method in the form demon- 
 strated to us here would be precipitate, that it should least of 
 all be recommended by the State ; and that . . . the 
 performance of protective inoculation by private individuals 
 should be completely forbidden. ..." (p. 235). 
 
 The men of science will no doubt wrangle over this matter 
 for some time to come. Meanwhile the lay public may 
 
i6 
 
 exercise its own humble common sense on a problem nearly- 
 connected therewith. Whither is Pasteurism to lead us ? 
 Vaccination as a protection from one special epidemic is a 
 thing which the majority of us have, rightly or wrongly, 
 accepted as a wise measure, though the anti-vaccinators have 
 shown cause both to doubt the extent of its preservative 
 power, and to credit it with certain "ghastly risks" more 
 terrible than those from which it should shield us. 
 
 Accepting vaccination, however, as a preservative from one 
 disease, how will it be when we and our cattle are to try 
 twenty similar preservatives for twenty other diseases ? Is 
 it really to be believed that the order of things has been so 
 perversely constituted as that the health of men and beasts is 
 to be sought, not as we fondly believed by pure and sober 
 living and cleanliness, but by the pollution of the very foun- 
 tains of life with the confluent streams of a dozen filthy 
 diseases ? Mr. Fleming indites a psalm of triumph over the 
 prospect of a boundless field of inoculations just opening to 
 the activity of medical men and veterinary surgeons, who will 
 go forth like so many sowers to scratch the people and cattle 
 instead of the ground, and drop " cultivated virus " by way of 
 seed or tares, as the case may prove. Are we then, our oxen, 
 our sheep, our pigs, our fowls (that is to say, our own bodies 
 and the food which nourishes them), all to be vaccinated, 
 porcinated, equinated, caninized, felinized, and bovinated, 
 once, twice, twenty times in our lives, or in a year ? Are we 
 to be converted into so many living nests for the comfortable 
 incubation of disease germs ? Is our meat to be saturated 
 with " virus," our milk drawn from inoculated cows, our eggs 
 laid by diseased hens — in short, are we to breakfast, dine and 
 sup upon disease by way of securing the perfection of healthy? 
 
 Surely, when this last medical bubble has burst, it will be 
 deemed the emptiest and the ugliest of the long series of 
 which potable gold and the Elixir of Life formed the 
 besrinninsr. 
 
17 
 
 The third article in the Nineteenth Century is by Dr. Lauder 
 Brunton, one of the authors of the " Handbook." The gist 
 of it consists in the attribution to vivisection of certain 
 alleged advances in our knowledge of digitalis, strychnia, 
 Calabar bean, pepsin, chloral, and nitrate of amyl. One 
 would conjecture at first sight that, with all these new 
 weapons wherewith to combat the Destroyer, the doctors 
 would by this time have sensibly reduced the rates of 
 mortality, and that at least four or five diseases should have 
 been definitely conquered. A few figures to such effect from 
 the Registrar- General's Report (which I fear somehow records 
 quite an opposite state of things) would certainly be more 
 satisfactory than to find all these new remedies paraded 
 before us without any means of checking the boasted results. 
 The unsatisfactory nature of these large statements may be 
 noted even by one who, like myself, cannot pretend to get to 
 the bottom of the matter — for example, in two instances out 
 of Dr. Lauder Brunton's list : — 
 
 " The experiments of Luchsinger," Dr. Brunton says, " and 
 of Rokitansky prove " — so and so. " If then we should give 
 strychnia at bedtime to the consumptive patient, we should 
 prevent the sweats. We try it accordingly, and the result 
 shows that the practical deductions from these apparently 
 useless experiments on animals are correct, for the sweats 
 cease and the prostration disappears " (p. 485). 
 
 This kind of thing addressed to the public who read the 
 Nineteenth Century sounds delightfully clear and conclusive. 
 But, by chance, I compare it with another report, written by 
 Dr. Brunton for his scientific brethren, and reprinted from 
 " St. Bartholomew's Hospital Reports," vol. xv. In this 
 latter honest report there are cited only four cases wherein the 
 beneficent effects of strychnia were tested. In Case 1 the 
 patient died having had "no night-sweats until a few days 
 before death." In Case 2 the remedy for the sweats caused 
 the patient to think it increased her cough every time it was 
 
administered. In Case 3 the remedy seems to have made 
 little difference. In Case 4 it seems to have stopped the 
 sweats, but we are not told whether the patient recovered. 
 These results scarcely bear out, I think, the unlimited asser- 
 tion in the Nineteenth Century, that on the application of the 
 remedy "the sweats cease and the prostration disappears." 
 
 Again, Dr. Lauder Brunton tells us — as if the matter were 
 beyond doubt : — 
 
 " The action of carbolic acid was first systematically 
 investigated by Lemaire, and its application by Lister to 
 surgery is one of the greatest boons to humanity of modern 
 times. Of its importance in antiseptic surgery no one can 
 be ignorant " (p. 485). 
 
 Who that reads the above in the Nineteenth Century would 
 suppose that at the recent Congress one of the most eminent 
 surgeons and vivisectors in Scotland, Dr. Keith, stated that 
 he had abandoned the system of carbolic acid, because he 
 found it to poison both himself and his patient ? Another no 
 less eminent English surgeon, Mr. Lawson Tait, wrote 
 publicly two months ago of Mr. Lister's boasted ligature : 
 " If the carbolic ligature had never been tried on animals, 
 where it seems to answer admirably, it never would have been 
 tried on human patients, where it fails miserably and has cost 
 many lives?" — Letter to Birmingham Daily Mail, July 21, 
 18S2. 
 
 I now reach the essay of Professor Yeo in the Fortnightly 
 Review. It chiefly consists of contradictions of my statements 
 in the January number of the same Review, together with 
 some remarks on the noble article of the Lord Chief Justice, 
 which had perhaps best be passed in silence. 
 
 Professor Yeo refers at great length to the annual Parlia- 
 mentary Returns of Licenses and Certificates granted under 
 the Vivisection Act, to prove the extreme paucity of painful 
 experiments, and adds, " No one will, I think, presume 
 
19 
 
 to say that this evidence is not absolutely unimpeachable 
 and without prejudice." — "No one?" Why, who in their 
 senses takes the word of accused men for their own secret 
 doings, and of what else do these returns consist ? There 
 is not even a pretence of real personal overlooking of 
 the laboratories by the Inspector, much less of visits paid 
 unawares. No doubt Mr. Busk has correctly noted the number 
 of licenses actually granted by the Home Office — so far is a 
 safe matter of official routine. But respecting the number of 
 experiments performed under each license, and the degree of 
 pain inflicted in such experiments, it is really crediting us 
 with too much simplicity, "weak-minded humanitarians" 
 though we be, to suppose we shall take the word of the very 
 men whom the returns are intended to check. Did not Dr. 
 Yeo indulge in a smile when he wrote the following : — 
 " There are no signs of any attempt to keep back anything 
 on the part of the experimenters ; on the contrary, they seem 
 to have been rather too punctilious ? " 
 
 It is not easy to write on such a matter as Inspection under 
 the Vivisection Act made by an Inspector who has been the 
 elected Vice-President of that Royal Society to which all the 
 leading vivisectors belong. But the following fable will 
 perhaps convey the sense in which not a few of us regard 
 the matter : — 
 
 FABLE. 
 " A Farmer once was much troubled by Mice in his Barn. 
 So he went to the Lion and begged for a Cat. The Lion at 
 first promised to send the Cat, but presently up came 3,000 
 Mice to the Lion's Den, and squeaked so loud at the notion, 
 that the Lion, who has a sneaking kindness for Mice, shook 
 his mane, and winked at the Mice, and spoke thus : ' I must 
 give the Cat to Mr. Bull ; but don't be afraid ! Pussy shall 
 not eat you.' So the Cat was turned into the Barn. It was 
 a nice sleek Cat, who went purring up and down with a bell 
 
20 
 
 round its neck, and never condescended to look down a 
 Mouse-hole. Indeed, it had enough to do lapping its own 
 cream without thinking of Mice. So whenever anybody 
 asked how things were going on, the Cat said always ' Purr,' 
 and never, ' Mew, mew,' and after a few years there were 
 twice as many Mice in the Barn as when the Farmer asked 
 for the Cat." 
 
 Professor Yeo next quotes, as of great weight against anti- 
 vivisectors, the resolution of the recent Congress in favour of 
 vivisection. Considering that among the votes taken in 
 favour of this resolution were no doubt his own and those of 
 Professors Humphry, Rutherford, Ferrier, Bacelli, Hermann, 
 Brown-Sequard, Charcot, Beclard, Chauveau, Virchow, Flint, 
 and Goltz, it is almost quizzical to ask us to be impressed by 
 their solemn approval of their own practice. A general 
 meeting of the Dominican Order under the presidency of 
 Torquemada would assuredly have passed equally unanimously 
 a parallel resolution : — " That this assembly records its 
 conviction that Autos da Fc have proved of the utmost service 
 to religion in the past, and are indispensable to the immortal 
 interests of the human race." 
 
 Lastly, I come to the portion of Professor Yeo's article 
 which personally concerns me. I take up the glove he has 
 thrown down, and call my readers to witness that I do so 
 without the smallest hesitation. 
 
 Professor Yeo disputes three of the cases of English cruelty 
 cited by me in the Fortnightly Review for January. He writes : — 
 
 " In the first the physiologist is quoted assaying : ' As soon 
 as the cat comes out of the chloroform, it lies in a helpless 
 state, and does not move or give any signs of feeling.' Com- 
 menting on this case, Miss Cobbe — quite ignoring the 
 important word chloroform — suggests that the animal is para- 
 lyzed by the intensity of its agony.' Can she really under- 
 stand the matter so little as to imagine that an animal 
 
21 
 
 suffers intense agony when it is completely stupefied by 
 chloroform ? " 
 
 Commenting on these remarks of Professor Yeo, I observe 
 that he, quite ignoring the important words "comes out of " 
 before " chloroform," rebukes me for not understanding the 
 cat to be " stupefied by chloroform " when the expenmentor 
 had expressly described it as having " come out of the chloro- 
 form." What does " coming out of chloroform " mean, if 
 not that the anaesthetic effects of the drug had ceased ? 
 
 2. Professor Yeo disputes my statements respecting Pro- 
 fessor Rutherford's experiments, which he says were " taken 
 from an inaccurate account of the operations by Dr. Walker," 
 and are introduced by the statement that at least fifty dogs, 
 under the express sanction of the law as it now stands, were 
 used in the experiments. Professor Yeo goes on to say : — 
 
 " We have seen by the official reports that no such number 
 of animals suffered pain during the year in which Professor 
 
 Rutherford made these experiments (1878) I happen 
 
 to know that the exact number of animals used by Professor 
 Rutherford under the certificate in question was twelve, and 
 that they form three-fourths of all the experiments where 
 the pain can be called appreciable that were done during 
 that year." 
 
 In my reference to Professor Rutherford's experiments in 
 the Fortnightly Revieiv, I gave no date whatever, and I know 
 not by what authority Professor Yeo pleases to fix on that of 
 1878. According to Dr. Rutherford's own statement in the 
 Scientific Reports of the British Medical Journal, May 5th, 
 1877, and December 14th, 1878, I find that altogether no less 
 than sixty-seven dogs (as a minimum) were tortured. " Each 
 experiment," Professor Rutherford says, " lasted the entire 
 day, at the close of which the animal was killed and the 
 alimentary canal examined." In the series for 1878, I find 
 that thirty-one dogs were thus experimented on ; and I now 
 ask Professor Yeo to be good enough to explain how the 
 
22 
 
 " twelve dogs " which he " happens to know " was the 
 " EXACT " number used by Professor Rutherford in 1878, 
 managed between them to be killed thirty-one times over, and 
 have their alimentary canals thirty-one times examined ? 
 Truly, these conflicting accounts of Professor Rutherford in a 
 scientific Report, and of Professor Rutherford's friend in the 
 Fortnightly Rcvieiv, are exceedingly puzzling to the lay 
 intelligence ; but perhaps Professor Yeo's little mistake of 
 twelve dogs for thirty-one still leaves his statement " accurate 
 enough for scientific purposes ? " 
 
 As to Professor Yeo's reference to the Official Report, 
 which states that " no such number of animals suffered pain 
 during the year in which Professor Rutherford made these 
 experiments," I can only remark that, with Professor Ruther- 
 ford's own account of his dogs in our hands, we need no 
 better evidence of the trustworthiness of those Official Reports 
 on which half Professor Yeo's paper is founded as " unim- 
 peachable evidence." 
 
 3. Finally, we arrive at Professor Yeo's last challenge. He 
 says (p. 361) : — 
 
 " The third set of experiments adduced in proof of English 
 cruelty is that performed by Dr. Roy on the innervation of 
 the kidney, which was mentioned in the Physiological Section 
 of the International Medical Congress. Of these experiments, 
 Miss Cobbe admits she knows nothing, yet she suggest that 
 they may prove a ghastly counterpart to some others, and 
 she appeals in a telling manner to Dr. Roy's hearers to tell 
 us what those experiments were. I heard him on that occa- 
 sion, and have also seen him operate, and I can assure your 
 readers that the infliction of pain had no part in the investigation, 
 for the animal was kept under chloroform all the time, and 
 was killed before it recovered from the anaesthetic." (p. 362.) 
 
 Here, then, we have something to definite to go upon. Pro 
 fessor Yeo says, he " has seen " Dr. Roy "operate," and that 
 the " infliction of pain had no part in the investigation." It 
 
23 
 
 would be too miserable a prevarication to offer this assurance 
 concerning one experiment, if others of the same series 
 involved frightful agony under curare alone. I therefore 
 assume that Dr. Yeo has here pledged his honour that the 
 infliction of pain had no part in any of these investigations 
 of Dr. Roy described at the Congress, certainly not in the 
 leading part of them. Now, what are the facts ? 
 
 Dr. Roy has, I find, published an account of these experi- 
 ments in two articles : first, on the Mechanism of the Renal 
 Secretion, in the Proceedings of the Cambridge Philosophical 
 Society, May 23rd, 1881 ; and second, on the Physiology and 
 Pathology of the Spleen, in the Journal of Physiology, for 
 January, 1882. In both these articles he states that the 
 animal — rabbit, cat, or dog, in most cases the latter — was 
 kept fully under the influence of ether, chloroform, or morphia 
 or a combination of two of these, from the commencement to 
 the end of the experiment. These statements will be 
 presently analyzed. 
 
 I now offer to the reader a summary of the contents of 
 these papers, and a commentary upon them, drawn up by a 
 gentleman perfectly qualified to deal with them scien- 
 tifically : — 
 
 " Of the character of these experiments all foreign experi- 
 mentors would acknowledge that, if they were not performed 
 on animals fully under the influence of some anaesthetic or 
 narcotic, the animals must have suffered atrocious agony, 
 more severe, perhaps, than in any of the so much reprobated 
 experiments performed by Mantegazza; for that experimentor 
 trusted to the nails with which he larded his victims for 
 causing irritation of any sensory nerves they might touch in 
 their passage, while in Dr. Roy's experiments the most 
 sensitive nerves were first carefully dissected out, then tied, 
 and the cut ends irritated by electricity. Now it so happens 
 that the major portion of both series of experiments consisted 
 in watching the effects of reflex action resulting from electrical 
 
24 
 
 irritation of the cut ends of a large number of sensory nerves 
 upon the blood-vessels or circulation in either organ. It is 
 also certain that such reflex actions could not be obtained 
 from animals rendered insensible by anesthetics or narcotics. On 
 this point the evidence of Dr. Brunton, himself an eminent 
 vivisector, and joint author of the notorious ' Handbook,' as 
 given before the Royal Commission (5745, 581 1), is very 
 explicit, and it is therefore clear from the results that the 
 animals were made to suffer this, the most agonizing part of 
 the experiments. 
 
 " The mutilations caused by dissecting out the various 
 structures to be manipulated might fairly be described as 
 something truly awful, as the detailed account presently to be 
 given will demonstrate. Most of these mutilations could be 
 performed even with advantage to the operator, under 
 anaesthetics, as a means of keeping the animals quiet, but 
 some could only be done well under curare and artificial 
 respiration ; for example, the dissecting out of the roots of 
 the splanchnics on both sides of the thorax, where, but for 
 artificial respiration, the lungs would collapse and the animal 
 at once die of suffocation. And as a matter of fact, we are 
 informed in both articles that curare and artificial respiration 
 were used in the experiments to keep the dogs quiet ; and if 
 under this drug stimulation of the sensory nerves took place 
 (and such a condition was, from an experimenter's point of 
 view, the most appropriate), then the animals (to use Claude 
 Bernard's classic expression) ' endured the most atrocious 
 sufferings that the imagination of man can conceive.' 
 
 " As regards the first and, from the published details, the 
 most severeof the two series of experiments, that on the kidneys, 
 the use of curare and artificial respiration is referred to 
 without any modifying circumstance or remark ; and that 
 there was great cruelty in that series we have upon authority 
 that neither Dr. Roy nor Dr. Yeo would dare to impugn. 
 In the account of the second series of experiments, on the 
 
25 
 
 spleen, Dr. Roy speaks (207 and 221) sometimes of the curare 
 being used, ' in addition to an anaesthetic agent,' during 
 electric stimulation of nerves and of the medulla. Now, in 
 the first place, we absolutely deny the possibility of keeping 
 an animal insensible by anaesthetics during curarization ; and 
 in the second place, if it had been possible to do so, the 
 operations now referred to are precisely those which could 
 not be performed, that is to say, they would give no result if 
 so performed ; and this we shall prove also from the very 
 clear evidence given before the Commission by Dr. Lauder 
 Brunton, to whom we have already referred as an accomplished 
 physiologist and part author of the ' Handbook.' 
 
 " Dr. Brunton's evidence refers specially to that very opera- 
 tion on the medulla, and to the whole class of electrical 
 stimulation of the nerves which we are now considering ; and 
 as it is too valuable to be multilated in any way, we give the 
 evidence exactly as it stands in questions 5472-3-4-5. 
 
 " ' Mr. Forster asks, 5742 : Then the purpose for which 
 wourali (curare) is used is in order to keep the animal quiet, to 
 make the experiment an easier one to conduct ? — Yes, in 
 frogs and in the higher animals it is to get rid of some of the 
 effects which might be due to irritation of the nerve centres. 
 For example, this is the case in some physiological experi- 
 ments that have been made in Germany by irritation of various 
 parts of the nervous system of the upper part of the spinal 
 cord (i.e., medulla). You want to ascertain the influence of 
 that part upon the vascular system generally, the system of 
 blood-vessels, and you want to ascertain that alone. If you 
 irritate this upper part of the cord after you have given 
 wourali, you only get the action upon the blood-vessels ; but 
 if you were to irritate this part without giving wourali 
 previously, you would get the irritation conducted all down 
 the ordinary motor nerves, and get all the muscles set into 
 violent action ; the action of the muscles would react upon 
 the vessels, and you would get the whole experiment disturbed. 
 
26 
 
 "'5743- I s there anything to prevent your giving both 
 drugs, or giving them mixed together, so as to stop the pain 
 by the chloroform and the nervous movement by wourali ? — 
 Yes, there is, and it is this : in very many of these experi- 
 ments you want to ascertain what is termed the reflex action ; 
 that is to say, that an impression is made upon a nerve, and 
 goes up to the cord, and is transmitted down. Now, chloroform 
 acts upon the reflex centres, and abolishes their influence 
 completely ; so that if you give the wourali, which paralyzes 
 the ends of the motor nerves, and give chloroform, which 
 paralyzes the reflex centres, you deprive yourself of the 
 possibility, in many instances, of making satisfactory experi- 
 ments. 
 
 " ' 5744. But are there not many instances in which you 
 give wourali simply for the purpose of getting the animal 
 perfectly quiet ? — Yes, those instances I have named. 
 
 " ' 5745- But if it is done for the purpose of getting the 
 animal perfectly quiet, could not chloroform be given also ? — 
 No, for that very reason ; if you were to give chloroform, the 
 experiment would be at an end ; you would have abolished 
 the action of the reflex centres, and thus you might as well 
 not do the experiment at all.' 
 
 " Now, with that exact and lucid explanation of Dr. Brunton 
 before them, dare either Dr. Roy or Dr. Yeo pretend that an 
 anaesthetic was used to make the animals insensible, either 
 under curare or without it, while electrical excitation of those 
 sensory nerves was being conducted, to obtain reflex reactions 
 on the blood-vessels of kidney and spleen ? And not being 
 used, can they deny that during all these operations the poor 
 mangled cats and dogs suffered atrocious agony ? 
 
 " There is still another insuperable difficulty in rendering 
 curarized animals insensible by anaesthetics which may occur to 
 many who are not physiologists. Most people are aware of the 
 necessity of touching the cornea, or doing some similar action, 
 while giving chloroform for a surgical operation, by way of 
 
27 
 
 testing the presence of sensibility, through inducing some 
 slight reflex action if sensibility persists. On the other hand, 
 many persons know by this time of the great difficulty there 
 has been in ascertaining whether or not sensitiveness persists 
 during the motor paralysis produced by curare. Scientific 
 opinion at the present day is almost unanimous in holding 
 that curare leaves sensation and consciousness intact, but 
 that is a question which has only been fully corroborated on 
 human beings who have been operated upon under curare, 
 and ' who remember all that has passed around them, and 
 the sufferings they have experienced ' (Bernard, in ' La 
 Chaleur Animale,' p. 63). As then the motor nerve to all 
 muscles of expression are paralysed, what possible sign could 
 be taken by Dr. Roy to mean that the animal was insensible ? 
 The thing is simply impossible, and this fact, coupled with 
 the equal impossibility of getting any results from experiments 
 of the kind we are considering, will probably lead most people 
 to place another value upon Dr. Roy's statement about 
 anaesthetics than that which he evidently desires. 
 
 " Let us now describe the mutilations and the character of 
 the operations which took place in some or other of these 
 experiments upon the kidney alone, probably in most of 
 them ; for, thanks to the secrecy guaranteed by the present 
 Act, we cannot tell the number of animals sacrificed, and we 
 are forced to take everything from the vivisector's own 
 story : — 
 
 " First, the animal would be curarized and artificial 
 respiration established. Then the kidneys on both sides 
 would be arrived at by means of an incision through the 
 loins ; they would then be dissected clear of all their sur- 
 roundings, often with ' the most laborious and minute cleaning 
 of the walls of the artery and vein ; ' they would then be 
 enclosed in a peculiarly shaped box, whose interior communi- 
 cated with a clockwork registering instrument (plethysmograph 
 and Ludwig's kymograph). 
 
28 
 
 " Again, the back of the skull would be cut away, and the 
 little brain (cerebellum) lifted up to allow the medulla oblongata 
 to be excited by weak induced currents of electricity. 
 Incisions would be also made along each side of the 
 windpipe, and the carotid arteries dissected out and closed 
 at times by applying a clamp. The same instrument would 
 be also applied to the innominate artery, to the renal arteries, 
 to the large branches of the aorta in the abdomen, and to the 
 abdominal aorta itself, below the point where the arteries to 
 the kidneys are given off. 
 
 " The chest and abdomen would be opened along their 
 whole length and a glass tube tied in the pipes (ureters) which 
 carry the urine from the kidneys to the bladder. 
 
 " The spinal canal would be opened in the region of the 
 neck by cutting through the backbone, and the roots of the 
 whole of the nerves leading to the anterior limbs (brachial 
 plexus of nerves) dissected out. 
 
 "The roots of the splanchnics in the thorax and these 
 nerves in their course through the diaphragm would also be 
 dissected out. To do this the anterior surface of the back- 
 bone in the chest and belly would have to be cleared on both 
 sides, and the contained organs moved from side to side as 
 required. 
 
 " The nerves leading to each kidney (from seven to eleven 
 in number) had also to be dissected out. 
 
 " The great nerves of the hip and leg (sciatic nerves) had 
 also to be reached, and also the vagus, the great nerve which 
 supplies all the organs in the chest and abdomen. 
 
 " All the nerves mentioned were tied in two places and cut, 
 the tying being for the purpose of lifting up either cut end 
 (central or peripheral end) in order to excite it by electricity. 
 Now tying a nerve, even although no bigger than a thread, 
 causes extreme agony (Evidence Minutes, 4230), and in these 
 poor animals all the principal sensory nerves in the body were 
 so tied. Then the central and peripheral cut ends of these 
 
29 
 
 nerves were stimulated with electricity from time to time, to 
 see what might chance to happen to the circulation in the 
 kidneys. 
 
 " Sometimes the artifical respiration was stopped for three 
 or four minutes to see what would happen to the same circu- 
 lation during suffocation. 
 
 " Various solutions of chemicals and drugs — nitrate of soda, 
 urea, acetate of potash, digitalis, and common salt, also 
 defibrinated blood, and serum from other dogs, were injected 
 into the veins, to see what effect these would have on the 
 kidney secretion. 
 
 " And what were the results of this horrible series of experi- 
 ments ? Every time a nerve was excited and a pang of 
 agony shot through the animal's frame there was only one 
 result (except when the nerves to the kidney were cut, and 
 therefore telegraphic communication broken) which happened 
 invariably — the kidney contracted. 
 
 " Another page might be filled with such details, and we 
 have not even yet reached the experiments on the spleen." 
 
 Here then is my answer to Professor Yeo's assertion, as 
 an eye-witness, that " the infliction of pain had no part in 
 Dr. Roy's investigation." 
 
 And here is also my answer to the charge of having mis- 
 represented British physiologists by comparing them to 
 foreign vivisectors. Dr. Roy, it is stated, is a young Scotch- 
 man, trained in Edinburgh. He obtained, through the 
 recommendation of Professor Burdon- Sanderson, the office of 
 Professor Superintendent of the Brown Institute, and, through 
 that of Dr. Michael Foster, the George Henry Lewes 
 Scholarship founded by the late George Eliot. It was doubt- 
 less by the help of the latter that he visited the continental 
 laboratories, and in one of them performed some of his experi- 
 ments in concert with Professor Cohnheim. The remainder 
 of the series, as well as the whole series of experiments on 
 
30 
 
 the spleen, were performed in the Physiological Laboratory 
 of Cambridge. 
 
 Thus the attempt of the advocates of vivisection to 
 distinguish modern English vivisection from the vivisection 
 practised by foreigners in Germany, Italy, and France, once 
 for all falls to the ground. These experiments of Dr. Roy — 
 among the most agonising in the records of vivisection — took 
 place neither far off nor long ago, nor yet were they the 
 work of any foreigner. They were done by our own countrymen , 
 within the last two years ; and the greater part of them on 
 English ground. Nay (most significant fact of all), the report 
 of them was publicly read in the Physiological Section of the 
 London Congress of 1881, and not one voice among all the 
 English physiologists present was raised to express disapproval 
 or rebuke. 
 
 Frances Power Cobbe. 
 
 ON THE VIVISECTORS. 
 
 In that day of awful wailing 
 
 Human destinies unvailing, 
 When man rising, stands before Thee, 
 
 Spare not these culprits, God of glory. 
 
THE GENIUS OF PITY STAYING THE 
 VIVISECTOR'S HAND. 
 
 (After the recent symbolic painting, by Gabriel Max, Germany.) 
 " The Genius of Pity stands besides a Physiologist, holding 
 in her hand a pair of scales. In one scale is a human brain, 
 surrounded with laurels; in another, a glowing heart. The 
 scale containing the heart, far outweighs the scale containing 
 (he brain. The right arm of the Genius is thrown round a 
 bound and bleeding dog." 
 
 Behold the heavier scale, wherein Man's heart 
 
 Doth far out-weigh his blood-enlaurelled brain, 
 Whilst, close beside, yon pitying Genius stands, 
 
 To stay the hand deep-skilled in craft of Pain ! 
 E'en could ye point — men of remorseless soul, 
 To lessened pangs among the human kind, 
 Still might we question of the final gain 
 
 From hearts grown ruthless as the wintry wind ! 
 But when, from all your myriad victims slain, 
 By torments direr than the mind may know, 
 Ye cannot point to one exalted truth, 
 
 To set against whole hecatombs of woe, 
 Men in whose breast one spark of pity glows, 
 
 Should wrest the scalpel from your tyrant hand, 
 To shield Man's faithful, but defenceless friends, 
 From miscalled Science, and her wolfish band ! 
 
 — Elliott Preston. 
 
POKE MED.- CENTER LIP 
 BISTORICAL COLLECTIOi