ction between
motor and sensory nerves, nor can original investigation be
pronounced absolutely valueless as respects remote possibility of
future gain. What the public has a right to ask of those who would
indefinitely prolong these experiments without State supervision or
control is, "What good have your painful experiments accomplished
during the past thirty years--not in ascertaining facts in physiology
or causes of rare or incurable complaints, but in the discovery of
improved methods for ameliorating human suffering, and for the cure
of disease?" If pain could be estimated in money, no corporation
ever existed which would be satisfied with such waste of capital
in experiments so futile; no mining company would permit a
quarter-century of "prospecting" in such barren regions. The usual
answer to this inquiry is to bring forward facts in physiology thus
acquired in the past, in place of facts in therapeutics. Thus, in a
recent article on Magendie to which reference has been made, we are
furnished with a long list of such additions to our knowledge. It may
be questioned, however, whether the writer is quite scientifically
accurate in asserting that, were our past experience in vivisection
abolished, "it would blot out _all_ that we know to-day in regard to
the circulation of the blood, * * the growth and regeneration of bone,
* * * the origin of many parasitic diseases, * * * the communicability
of certain contagious and infectious diseases, and, to make the list
complete, it would be requisite * * to take _a wide range in addition
through the domains of pathology and therapeutics_." Surely somewhat
about these subjects has been acquired otherwise than by experiments
upon animals? For example, an inquiring critic might wish to know a
few of the "many parasitic diseases" thus discovered; or what
contagious and infectious diseases, whose communicability was
previously unknown, have had this quality demonstrated solely by
experiments on animals? And what, too, prevented that "wide range into
therapeutics" necessary to make complete the list of benefits due to
vivisection? In urging the utility of a practice so fraught with
danger, the utmost precaution against the slightest error of
overstatement becomes an imperative duty. Even so distinguished a
scientist as Sir John Lubbock once rashly asserted in Parliament that,
"without experiments on living animals, we should never have had the
use of ether"! Nearly every America