screet in
their use of vivisection. To-day we have before our eyes a very
different spectacle. Under pretence of experimentally demonstrating
physiology, the professor no longer ascends the rostrum; he places
himself before a vivisecting-table, has live animals brought to him,
and experiments. The habitual spectators at the School of Medicine,
the College of France, and the Faculty of Sciences, know how
experiments are made on the living flesh, how muscles are divided and
cut, the nerves wrenched or dilacerated, the bones broken or
methodically opened with gouge, mallet, saw, and pincers. Among other
tortures there is that horrible one of the opening of the vertebral
canal or of the spinal column to lay bare membranes and the substance
of the marrow; IT IS THE SUBLIME OF HORROR. One needs to have
witnessed that sight thoroughly to comprehend the real sense of the
word `vivisection.' Whoever has not seen an animal under experiment
CANNOT FORM AN IDEA OF THE HABITUAL PRACTICES OF THE VIVISECTORS.
M. Dubois drew an eloquent picture of these practices, become usual in
the physiological amphitheatres in the midst of blood and of howls of
pain, and he showed that under the dominant influence of the
vivisectors, physiological instruction has gone out of its natural
road. Himself an eminent pathologist, he treated without ceremony the
unjustifiable pretensions of those innovators, who, regardless at once
of the principles of physiology and those of pathology, try to
transport clinical surgery to the table of vivisection.

"M. Dubois, indeed, was so pungent in his censures that some of the
Academicians left the hall without awaiting the end of his discourse.
The veterinary part of his audience heard him to the end, and, it is
to be hoped, profited by the picture he drew of the sight that met his
eyes on his first visit to Alfort. M. Renault, the director of the
establishment, took M. Dubois into a vast hall, where five or six
horses were thrown down, each one surrounded by a group of pupils,
either operating or waiting their turn to do so. Each group was of
eight students, and matters were so arranged that each student could
perform eight operations, so well graduated that, although the sixty-
four operations lasted ten hours, a horse could endure them all before
being put to death. Although unwilling to hurt the feelings of his
host, M. Dubois could not help letting slip the word `ATROCITY.'
`Atrocities, if you please