pets--and aren't some of them the dumbest
things you ever saw!--especially chow dogs and love birds.

I will admit there is something to be said on both sides of the
argument. This dissecting of live subjects may have been carried to
extremes on occasions. When I read in the medical journals that
the eminent Doctor Somebody succeeded in transferring the interior
department of a pelican to a pointer pup, and vice versa with such
success that the pup drowned while diving for minnows, and the pelican
went out in the back yard and barked himself to death baying at the
moon, I am interested naturally; but, possibly because of my ignorance,
I fail to see wherein the treatment of infantile paralysis has been
materially advanced. On the other hand I would rather the kind and
gentle Belgian hare should be offered up as a sacrifice upon the
operating table and leave behind him a large family of little Belgian
heirs and heiresses--dependent upon the charity of a cruel world--than
that I should have something painful which can be avoided through making
him a martyr. I would rather any white rabbit on earth should have the
Asiatic cholera twice than that I should have it just once. These are my
sincere convictions, and I will not attempt to disguise them.

Thanks too, to medical science we know about germs and serums and diets
and all that. Our less fortunate ancestors didn't know about them. They
were befogged in ignorance. As recently as the generation immediately
preceding ours people were unacquainted with the simplest rules of
hygiene. They didn't care whether the housefly wiped his feet before
he came into the house or not. The gentleman with the drooping,
cream-separator mustache was at perfect liberty to use the common
drinking cup on the railroad train. The appendix lurked in its
snug retreat, undisturbed by the prying fingers of curiosity. The
fever-bearing skeeter buzzed and flitted, stinging where he pleased. The
germ theory was unfathomed. Suitable food for an invalid was anything
the invalid could afford to buy. Fresh air, and more especially fresh
night air, was regarded as dangerous, and people hermetically sealed
themselves in before retiring. Not daily as at present was the world
gladdened by the tidings that science had unearthed some new and
particularly unpleasant disease. It never occurred to a mother that she
should sterilize the slipper before spanking her offspring. Babies were
not reared antiseptically, b