with the preternaturalists of Spiritism. If M. de Cyon is speaking solely of German cases he should say so. His language appears to apply equally to the English agitation.

All this, however, is purely preliminary. M. de Cyon's case, so far as he presents one-and I find it very difficult to discover, precisely what his case is-appears to me to be this :-People who are not physiologists, and cannot judge of the importance of the physiological ends to be gained by painful experimentation on living animals, have no title to an opinion on the right and wrong of the question at all. They are simply as incompetent to form an opinion, as a man who does not know astronomy is to form an opinion on the value of sending out expeditions to observe a transit of Venus, or a man who knows no language but his own is on the importance of recasting the classification of the Aryan and Semitic tongues. M. de Cyon condemns his scientific brethren for wasting any argument on us-"To whom do the physiologists and doctors address their refutations of the foolish accusations brought against them? To the general public, clearly; to members of the Government and of Parliament; that is, to outsiders whose judgment has no value at all iu matters of science." And he says further, that if Ministers and Parliament have been misled, "the fault must rest first of all with the physiologists themselves, who, in deigning to enter the arena at all with such adversaries, gave them unmerited credit with the crowd." Apparently what M. de Cyon would have recommended to his English scientific brethren would have been first to attack the motives of their adversaries with great violence :-" Since they were attacked with virulent personalities, why should they not answer with arguments ad hominem, which would have baffled the knaves, held up the fanatics to ridicule, and snatched from one leader his humanitarian mask, and from another his scientific reputation?" In the next place M. de Cyon would have had them band together to refuse their medical help to the leaders of the Anti-vivisection movement, which he thinks would have had the effect of a kind of interdict. And in the last place when the Vivisection Bill was carried and made an Act of Parliament, he would have had the great physiologists throw up their chairs as teachers and investigators, on the ground that teaching and investigation could no longer be scientific and complete. But I cannot say that I think M. de Cyon's advice will recommend itself to the views of his English colleagues. It is not only very intemperate advice, which would have made those who followed it ridiculous instead of formidable, but it is founded on the most extraordinary misconception of the true issue. No reasonable person ever fancied for a moment that any one but a physiologist is competent to criticize the value of the physiological ends which the physiologists propose to themselves in vivisection. I for my part never heard of any one who differed on this point from M. de Cyon. But then it has

absolutely no bearing on the question at issue. If it had, M. de Cyon should clearly go on to claim that even if physiologists pursued their terrible experiments on human beings, the public should leave the right and wrong of that proceeding also, wholly to the judgment of physiologists themselves. The reason why politicians and the people at large claim a voice in this matter is not that they pretend to understand the scientific issues involved, but that they do understand as well as the physiologists themselves, the moral issues involved, and have just as much right to give their opinion on these issues as any physiologist can have. M. de Cyon's logic suggests that, when an English carrier is brought before a magistrate for forcing his horse up-hill with a weight behind him which only the spasmodic effect of extreme torture can induce the creature to drag at all, it is quite enough for the carrier to reply: No one except myself knows the all-sufficient character of the motive which compelled me to impose this cruel task upon my horse. I, however, know that my motive was an ample justification for what I have done, and I must decline. to be judged by those who cannot enter into my motive.' The English magistrate would probably answer: My good fellow, the Cruelty to Animals Act takes no account of your motive. It assumes that to secure the kindly treatment of the domestic animals is one of the most important objects of civilized life, and it requires a sharp penalty to be imposed on you for attempting to get out of your horse more work than anything less than torture could compel him to do.' But precisely in the same way English politicians reply to M. de Cyon: Of course we are no judges of the physiological objects you have in view in your experiments. They may be what you please. What we do maintain, however, is this, that there is a much higher moral object in prohibiting torture, even for the discovery of new truth, than any which you can plead for experiments involving torture; and of the relative importance of cherishing humane habits and promoting scientific discovery, the general public are just as good judges as you are; and they will not allow for a moment that you have any more right to be jud ges inyour case than the carrier or the costermonger has to be the judge in his own case.'

M. de Cyon appears to me to suggest nothing in answer to this except that physiologists are exceptionally humane. But though I have never for one moment thought that the greater number of them are not anxious to avoid inflicting pain, whenever, as he says, "the nature of the experiment admits of it," yet it is absolutely certain that in a great number of cases the nature of the experiment does not admit of avoiding the infliction of pain; and I think it is equally certain that however humane the physiologists may be, they are by no means exceptionally humane, but, on the contrary, exceptionally disposed to rate scientific ends, however trivial, much higher than any aversion they

may happen to feel to the infliction of pain, however acute, as the price of attaining those scientific ends. On the Royal Commission I heard from that distinguished physiologist, Dr. Klein, a frank confession that he regarded nothing but the scientific end, and never thought of the use of anaesthetics, except for the purpose of facilitating the attainment of the scientific end. Moved by the remonstrances of his English colleagues, Dr. Klein was anxious subsequently to withdraw that evidence, but I was perfectly satisfied at the time, and am so still -as indeed were all my colleagues-that Dr. Klein's first statement of the case perfectly represented his true mind, and that the only feeling he had for the humanitarian motive was one of profound and unadulterated scorn. I do not say that his state of mind is common among physiologists anywhere; but I do say that something dangerously approximating to it is not at all rare among physiologists, and that we find, for instance, in Dr. Rutherford, of Edinburgh,—who has put some scores of dogs to an eight hours' torture each, solely to ascertain, more accurately than, in his opinion, he could have ascertained under anæsthesia, the precise action of various drugs in promoting the secretion of bile,-a somewhat close approximation to Dr. Klein's state of mind. Indeed, I fear that M. de Cyon's own feeling is not so far removed from Dr. Klein's as I should have desired to think it, when I find him confessing that "if I operate on animals with the greatest composure, it is, in the first place, because during the operation I think of nothing at all but the scientific result to be obtained; and then, because in every case where the object of the experiment admits of the use of anesthetics, the animal has been rendered completely insensible," and yet in the same breath declaring to us, "I have never yet been able to bring myself to operate on a human being," and again, "eighteen years of medical practice and of uninterrupted vivisections have never dulled my sensibilities in this respect." Surely those are very strange sensibilities, which are quieted completely by the consciousness of a scientific object, but are not quieted in the least by a directly healing purpose. When M. de Cyon calmly remarks, "In a surgical operation the interest of the operator is often mainly in his fee," he publishes a much grosser libel on his medical brethren than any I have ever seen published by the promoters of the movement against vivisection. As regards the use of anaesthetics there is, I suppose, between the case of operations on human beings and the case of animal vivisections no difference unless it be one favourable to the former; the main difference is this, that the operations undertaken on human beings are exclusively for their own good, while those undertaken on vivisected animals are exclusively for the good of science. When, then, M. de Cyon confesses that for the good of science he can inflict, "with the utmost composure," torture which his sensibilities will not permit him to inflict at

all for the good of the creatures which suffer beneath his lancet, he appears to me to confess that the scientific aim has a much more potent effect in suppressing his sensibilities than the benevolent aim; that scientific ends indurate the sensibilities much more completely to any pangs of which they appear to require the infliction than benevolent ends like those of surgeons; for I wholly reject as false the insinuation that eminent surgeons are usually thinking, during the operations they perform, more of their fees than of the immediate relief to suffering which they are endeavouring to give.

Again, nothing strikes me more forcibly in M. de Cyon's essay than his attack on Englishmen for the pity which they show for lunatics and idiots. He seems positively indignant at the waste of money on lunatic asylums and idiot asylums, and says of his English experience, "One would almost suppose, to look at it, that madmen and idiots by the very fact of their going out of their minds, had rendered the most signal service to the State and to society." Did it never occur to M. de Cyon that not pity but gratitude is what we feel to those who "render signal service to the State and to society," and that pity is totally distinct from gratitude, admitting indeed much less possibility of admixture with selfish motives than gratitude often contains? What we feel for madmen and idiots, and what we feel for the victims of M. de Cyon's vivisections, whenever his scientific object does not admit of anæsthesia, is infinite pity, the deepest possible desire to make up by any sacrifice of some of the blessings of our own lives, for the unutterable misery of those helpless and lonely sufferers.

M. de Cyon concludes his paper by the remark that the Antivivisection movement flourishes only in the "rigid creed" of Protestantism and Free-thought, and that it wins no converts from amongst Roman Catholics, because Catholics find in "the ecstatic adoration of the Heart of Jesus or of the Blessed Virgin" sufficient food for "the mysticism of disordered minds." "The Catholic religion,” he goes on," provides full satisfaction for the mystical and superstitious tendencies indigenous to the soil of the human mind ;" and, therefore, he suggests, Catholics are not thrown back on such humanitarian agitations as that against vivisection which he is denouncing. This seems to me a very doubtful compliment to Catholicism, and not one which the best Catholics of my own acquaintance will be at all likely to accept. In England at least, no Protestant has taken up a stronger attitude in denouncing the inhumanities of vivisection than Cardinal Manning himself; while some of the heartiest friends of the movement known to me are thoroughly devout members of the Roman Church. Indeed I hardly know whether M. de Cyon means that the Roman Catholic religion discourages the anti-vivisection agitations because it is so true, or because it is so false, because it affords full satisfaction to

the legitimate cravings of the human heart, or because it invents an artificial satisfaction for the morbid cravings of the human heart. He could hardly speak, I suppose, of the Roman Catholic faith as satisfying "superstitious tendencies" if he meant that the Roman Catholic faith is true; and yet he could hardly speak of the "rigid creed” of the Protestants or the Free-thinkers, if he thought either creed nearer the truth than the Catholic creed. But in reality it does not

much matter from what point of view he writes as he does. If he thinks that the Roman Catholic faith so thoroughly satisfies the legitimate yearnings of the heart, that it leaves no room for tender sympathy with the sufferings of men's poor neighbours, the brute creation, he accuses it of stopping far short of the true Divine charity; and if he means that by allowing full play to the morbid side of devotion, it diverts our morbid feelings out of the practical into the purely speculative sphere, he must either think it false, or hold very peculiar views indeed as to the providential provision of a number of false stimulants to meet the demands of diseased and unnatural wants. Whichever he means, he must certainly be thinking lightly of the religion which he seems so greatly to prefer to the popular religion of this country. The adoration of a perfect woman must be worth very little if it does not stir still more deeply the womanly instinct of compassion for helpless misery; or if, as M. de Cyon half implies, its only real value is to administer satisfaction to unhealthy sensibilities, he will find it hard to show why it is wise to find satisfaction of any sort for sensibilities which, according to him, are intrinsically unmanly, and ought rather to be suppressed or extirpated than fostered or gratified. Certainly I prefer the Protestantism which declares openly that if we ought not to pursue speculative discoveries at the cost of torture to our fellowcreatures, we are bound to forbid and prevent such torture; while, if we ought, then it becomes a duty to root out of our hearts that sickly compassion which interferes with physiological investigations. Only, if the latter conclusion be adopted, it is certain that physiological experiments should not be restricted to dumb animals, but should be pursued boldly on men,-at all events on all those convicts under sentence of death whom the State can provide for the physiologists as having forfeited their moral claim on the respect and sympathy of man. It is idle to say that the torture of men in the true interest of science is always wicked, if the torture of inferior creatures in the true interest of science is always right.

RICHARD HOLT HUTTON.