ding that when sensibility was
returning "THE PRESSURE GOES UP"; if it be true, as Professor Dixon,
of King's College, London, told the Royal Commissioners, "you can see
whether you are giving enough (of the anaesthetic) BY LOOKING AT THE
BLOOD-PRESSURE"; if the professor of physiology at Oxford was correct
in stating that "A RISE OF BLOOD-PRESSURE" would tell an experimenter
whether or not an animal undergoing vivisection was feeling pain, even
though curare had rendered it so helpless that it could not even wink
an eye, and that this rise of blood-pressure was the "ONE OBVIOUS WAY"
of determining such sensibility; if we may depend upon the evidence of
the professor of physiology at the University of Cambridge, that "PAIN
WOULD CAUSE A RISE OF BLOOD-PRESSURE"; if the agreement of all these
scientific authorities concerning the rise of blood-pressure as an
indication of pain or returning sensibility can be accepted as
scientific truth--then may we not be sure that all of the living
animals whose vivisection we have here reviewed, in whose bodies, by
fire and steel and every phase of mutilation, there was so constantly
elicited this RISE OF BLOOD-PRESSURE, cannot be said to have attained
a painless death? "A man about to be burned under a railway car begs
somebody to kill him, yet iti s a statemnet to be taken literally,
that a brief death by burning would be considered a happy release by a
human being undergoing the experiences of some of the animals that
slowly die in a laboratory." So wrote Dr. Bigelow of Harvard
University, the most eminent surgeon that New England has yet
produced; and were he living to-day, it is not improbable that he
would point to some of the experiments here reviewed as examples of
the vivisections he intended to condemn. It may be that although the
present generation be indifferent, posterity will not condone, and
that one day it will hold up some of the experiments of the twentieth
century as involving the most prolonged, the most useless, the most
terrible, the most cruel torments, that the annals of animal
vivisection have ever supplied.

CHAPTER XIII

WHAT IS VIVISECTION REFORM?

Every reflecting man must recognize that the settlement of the
vivisection question is a problem that must find its solution at some
period in future rather than to-day. But the duty of the hour remains
the same. Admitting the existence of the wrong, what can we do t