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who are our fellow-lodgers in this planet house of the Almighty.[1] As life is more than meat, so are there better things to live for than Knowledge or escape from Pain; nor is any fact which Science can reveal worth acquiring at the price of base selfishness and cruelty. The brutes are not mere toys and puzzles, put here by their Creator and ours that we may freely divert ourselves by breaking them to pieces to see how His wisdom has made them, but fellow-creatures with ourselves—sinless fellow-creatures, be it remembered, who have broken no Divine law and deserved no punishment. If the day comes (as it is our faith it will, hereafter) when all men shall look back upon the deeds done upon earth, and behold them in their true colors, must it not be that in the agonies of remorse and self-abhorrence in the Vivisector's soul will be meted out the measure of justice he has dealt to his victims?
Are we to sit down in despair and let this evil grow to full size, and allow first all the medical, and then all the ordinary schools throughout the country to become Academies of Torture, with class-books abridged from the "Hand-book of the Physiological Laboratory"? Shall we have the Royal Institution in Albemarle Street turned into an
- ↑ It may soon become a grave question whether even such vivisections as can be performed painlessly by the help of anasthetics and the immediate destruction of the subject of experiment before the return of consciousness, can continue to be morally justified, if the line between them and painful experiments is shown by physiologists to be beyond the power of the Legislature to define or guard; and observing also that even the painless practice assumes and strengthens the above false conception of the relationship between man and brute, and habituates students to regard creatures endowed with affection and intelligence as mere blocks of wood fitly submitted to the saw or the chisel.
