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a certain small section of it,[1] is, therefore, quite otherwise significant than the rise of a silly or cruel fashion among the jeunesse dorée of the clubs and the race-course, or the prevalence of an idle delusion in certain urban coteries.
Such manifestations is, I apprehend, actually observable in the very rapid extension of the practice of painful Experiments on Animals, to which some prominence has lately been given in public discussion. In the present paper, I purpose studiously to avoid detailing, or even alluding specifically to, any of the multiform horrors which are classified under the name of Vivisections. But without harrowing the reader by similar descriptions, I shall merely point to such experiments as those narrated by Dr Hoggan, and the singularly ingenious varieties of torture which fill the large volumes of French and English physiological handbooks, and suggest to my readers the inquiry: Whether this sort of thing be not strangely at variance with the tone of thought and practice which at present prevail in other departments of human activity; and whether such books, for example, as these Catechisms of the Art of Torture, do not even stand unique in the literature of the world? While our legislation tends to an almost excessive lenity towards criminals; while our Art and our Letters become yearly more refined and fastidious; while our manners grow more
- ↑ Probably the grent astronomers and geologists would be the very last to countenance such practices ag those to which reference is made. Mrs. Somerville’s expressions of abhorrence of them are repealed many times in her "Recollections;" and the late venerable Sir Charles Lyell, a short time before his death, answered the writer's inquiries as to his opinion with a shudder of disgust, and added: "I do not even like to think of all the insects I killed when I was a young man and made my entomological collection. Of course I did it with every precaution to save them pain, but I do not like to remember it now."
