Page:The moral aspects of vivisection (IA 101694999.nlm.nih.gov).pdf/9

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9

character. It is the boast of the school of science to which they belong that it has exploded the old theory that man was unique in creation, with a higher origin than the brutes, and a different destiny. They give us to understand that God has "made of one blood" at least all the Mammalia "upon earth."[1] Not merely our purely corporeal frames, but Thought, Memory, Love, Hate, Hope, Fear, and even some shadowy analogues of Conscience and Religion have been traced by the great thinker and truly tender-hearted man at the head of this school, throughout the lower realms of life upon this planet; and, in the eyes of most cultivated and thoughtful persons in these days, the claims of a dog, an elephant, a seal or a chimpanzee, to consideration and compassion, are at least as high as were those of a Negro a century ago in the eyes of a Jamaica planter. To find a number of men of science—disciples, it is believed, almost without exception, of the doctrine of Evolution—themselves pursuing, and teaching their pupils to pursue, trains of physiological investigations involving unutterable suffering to these same "Poor Relations" of our human family, is an appalling phenomenon. That the disciples of Darwin should themselves be the teachers and leaders in a new development of most exquisite cruelty to the brutes whom they believe to share our blood, our intelligence, and our

  1. Or rather, perhaps, their views may be more accurately rendered according to the newest Genesis, which tells us that after “the Unknowable moved upon the Cosmos and evolved protoplasm: by accretion and absorption came the radiata and mollusea; and mollusea begat articuluta, and articulata begat vertebrata... And there followed the generation of the higher vertebrata in the cosmic period when the Unknowable evolved the bipedal mammalian."