ntry by a single experimenters; in the
ingenuity and variety of the mutilations to which the victims were
subjected--mutilations and stimulations calculated to cause the
extremest agony, unless the anaesthesia was perfect; in the seeming
affirmation of absolute insensibility of the wretched animals,
although contradicted by the only sign of suffering that in some cases
could possibly be seen; in the apparent uselessness of experiments,
repeated again and again simply to elicit precisely the same
phenomena; above all, in the absence from criticism which some of
these "investigations" have managed to secure--all this constitutes a
claim for especial consideration. There can be little doubt that they
merely illustrate what goes on to-day, in many a laboratory in the
United States, in secret--as these were made in secret--and untouched
by the criticism of the outer world.

Of the absolute uselessness of the vast majority of these experiments
much might be said, but it is aside from this inquiry. The question
of utility is not here raised. The one matter of inquiry is the
existence of pain.

If a vast number of the experiments recorded may have involved the
keenest agony of the victims, how are we to explain the repeated
assertions that sensation was absolutely removed? Among
antivivisectionists there are those who belive that any human being
who could thus subject animals to torment would not find it impossible
to deny the fact. Such explanation implies an inveracity which it is
not necessary to impute. Mankind is still liable to error; the false
deductions of honest men have more than once led to mistaken
affirmations of facts; and the most illustrious scientist that ever
lived can hardly claim infallibility in matters of opinion. A
distinguished philosopher and vivisector of three hundred years ago,
Rene Descartes, put forth the theory that animals, being without
souls, cannot suffer pain, and that their cries under vivisection were
simply as the whirring of wheels in an intricate piece of machinery.
We can easily imagine a modern follower of Descartes declaring, as the
philosopher would have done, that "NO SUFFERING WAS FELT." A professor
of physiology in Harvard Medical School, in course of an address
before a State medical society, laid down the theory that "it is
ENTIRELY IMPOSSIBLE to draw conclusions with regard to the sensations
of animals by an effort to imagine what our own would be under similar
circums