eons of that Commonwealth. Some
of them had also seen vivisection as practised in Paris and Leipsic.
Here was a man at the head of their profession protesting against the
introduction of the vivisection laboratory system in his own country.

He insists over and over again that we cannot tell the degree of agony
inflicted by experiments upon the nervous system, nor measure its
intensity:

"Who can say whether a guinea-pig, the pinching of whose carefully
sensitized neck throws him into convulsions, attains this blessed
momentary respite of insensibility by an unexplained special machinery
of the nervous currents, OR A SENSIBILITY TOO EXQUISITELY ACUTE FOR
ANIMAL ENDURANCE? Better that I or my friend should die than protract
existence through accumulated years of torture upon animals whose
exquisite suffering we cannot fail to infer, even though they may have
neither voice nor feature to express it."

It is not the fact of suffering, but the useless waste of suffering
that chiefly repels him:

"If a skilfully constructed hypothesis could be elaborated up to the
point of experimental test by the most accomplished and successful
philosopher, and if then a single experiment, though cruel, would
forever settle it, we might reluctantly admit that it was justified.
But the instincts of our common humanity indignantly remonstrate
against the testing of clumsy or unimportant hypotheses by prodigal
experimentation, or MAKING THE TORTURE OF ANIMALS AN EXHIBITION TO
ENLARGE A MEDICAL SCHOOL, or for the entertainment of students--not
one in fifty of whom can turn it to any profitable account. The limit
of such physiological experiment, in its utmost latitude, should be to
establish truth in the hands of a skilful experimenter, and not to
demonstrate it to ignorant classes and encourage them to repeat it."

One cannot but remark the clear distinction of views which these words
indicate. No antivivisectionist would accept the suggestion of a
single experiment. Dr. Bigelow is speaking as a restrictionist
against the free and unlimited vivisection which he rightly foresaw
was about to be introduced into this country, and which has become the
practice of the present day. He realizes that if once the laboratory
system gains a foothold in his own college, the system will spread
throughout America:

"The reaction which follows every excess will in time bear indignantly
upon this. Until then it is dreadful to think how many poor