s to the number, it is calculated, of 70,000 creatures; and he
now asks for ten dogs a week in Geneva. All over Germany and France
there are laboratories "using" (as the horrible phrase is) numberless
animals, inasmuch as I have just received a letter stating that dogs
are actually becoming scarce in Lyons, and it is proposed to breed
them for the purpose of Vivisection. Be this true or not, I invite any
of your readers to visit the office of the Victoria Street Society,
and examine the volumes of splendid plates of vivisecting instruments,
which will there be shown them, and then judge for themselves whether
it be for a few experiments that those elaborate and costly inventions
have become a regular branch of manufacture. Let them examine the
volume of the English handbook of the physiological laboratory, the
volume of Cyon's magnificent atlas, with its 54 plates, the _Archives
de Physiologie_, with its 191 plates, the _Physiologische Methodik_,
or Claude Bernard's _Lecons sur la Chaleur Animale_, with its pictures
of the stoves wherein he baked dogs and rabbits alive; and after these
sights of disgust and horror they will know how to understand the word
"few" in the vocabulary of a physiologist. I am glad to hear that a
German opponent of Vivisection recently entering a shop devoted to the
sale of these tools of torture, was greeted by the proprietor with a
volley of abuse: 'It is you and your friends,' he said, 'who are
destroying my trade. I used to sell a hundred of Czermak's tables and
other instruments for one I sell now.'

"Dr. Pye-Smith said: 'Many of the experiments inflicted no pain or
injury whatever, and the great majority of the rest were rendered
painless by the use of those beneficial agents which abolished pain
and had themselves been discovered by experiments upon living
animals.' As to the use of anaesthetics in annulling the agonies of
mutilated animals, the audience ought to have asked Dr. Pye-Smith to
explain whether he intended to refer to chloroform, or the narcotic
morphia, or, lastly, to the drug _curare_. If he referred to
chloroform, Dr. Hoggan tells from his own experience (_Anaesthetics_,
p. 1), that 'nothing can be more uncertain than its influence on
the lower animals; many of them die before they become insensible.
Complete and conscientious anaesthesia is seldom even attempted,
the animal getting at most a slight whiff of chloroform _by way of
satisfying the conscience of the operator_,