any scientific justification." This
is extraordinary language for one experimentalist to use regarding
others! If it is possible that such men as Claude Bernard and
Professor Flint have "jumped at" one utterly unscientific conclusion,
notwithstanding the most painstaking of vivisections, what security
have we that other of our theories in physiology now regarded as
absolutely established may not be one day as severely ridiculed by
succeeding investigators? Is it, after all, true, that the absolute
certainty of our most important deductions must remain forever hidden
"unless the animal can speak"?

[A] "He feels the pain, but has lost, so to speak, the idea
of self defense." Lecons de Physiologie operatoire, 1879, p.
115.

[B] Text-Book of Human Physiology, p. 595.

II. Between advocating State supervision of painful vivisection, and
proposing with Mr. Bergh the total suppression of all experiments,
painful or otherwise, there is manifestly a very wide distinction.
Unfortunately, the suggestion of any interference whatever invariably
rouses the anger of those most interested--an indignation as
unreasonable, to say the least, as that of the merchant who refuses a
receipt for money just paid to him, on the ground that a request for a
written acknowledgement is a reflection upon his honesty. I cannot see
how otherwise than by State supervision we are to reach abuses which
confessedly exist. Can we trust the sensitiveness and conscience
of every experimenter? Nobody claims this. One of the leading
physiologists in this country, Dr. John C. Dalton, admits "that
vivisection may be, and has been, abused by reckless, unfeeling, or
unskillful persons;" that he himself has witnessed abroad, in a
veterinary institution, operations than which "nothing could be more
shocking." And yet the unspeakable atrocities at Alfort, to which,
apparently, Dr. Dalton alludes, were defended upon the very ground he
occupies to-day in advocating experiments of the modern laboratory and
classroom; for the Academie des Sciences decided that there was "no
occasion to take any notice of complaints; that in the future, as in
the past, vivisectional experiments must be left entirely to the
judgment of scientific men." What seemed "atrocious" to the more
tender-hearted Anglo-Saxon was pronounced entirely justifiable by the
French Academy of Science.

A curious question suggests itself in connection with this point.
There can be littl