"Life of Hunter," p. 57.
[1] Hunter's Works, vol. iv., p. 133.

The influence of Hunter upon English biology was undoubtedly very
great. In a mean and sordid society, he was an enthusiast for the
acquisition of knowledge, and while his passion for physiology
induced--as it so often does--an indifference regarding the infliction
of pain, his pitiless vivisections were not more cruel than
experiments made in this twentieth century, and some of them by men of
national reputation. He was the type of the class of experimenters
whom Dr. Johnson had in his mind, men whose long practice in the
infliction of torment creates an indifference to the ordinary emotions
of humanity, so that even in the causation of agony they find
something "to amuse," and in the performance of the most painful
vivisection an occasion for "supreme delight."

CHAPTER IV

MAGENDIE AND HIS CONTEMPORARIES

It may be doubted whether any physiologist has ever lived whose
cruelty to animals exceeded that which, for a long period, was
exercised by Franc,ois Magendie. Born at Bordeaux, France, in 1783,
just before the beginning of the French Revolution, he studied
medicine, receiving his medical degree in the year 1808. Entering
with some zest upon the study of physiology, he published several
pamphlets regarding his investigations, and rapidly earned that
notoriety--which for some natures is the equivalent of fame--for the
peculiar and refined torments which, in public demonstrations, he took
frequent occasion to inflict. In 1821 he was elected a member of the
Institute; in 1831 he had become a professor in the College de France,
a position he held for the remainder of his life. He died in 1855.

One of the earliest exposures of Magendie's infamous vivisections was
made in the British Parliament. On February 24, 1825, Mr. Richard
Martin of Galway, an Irish Member of the House of Commons, moved to
bring in a Bill for the repression of bear-baiting and other forms of
cruelty to animals. His name is worth remembering, for to this
Richard Martin belongs the honour of being one of the first men in any
land who attempted to secure some repression of cruelty to animals
through the condemnation of the law. During his speech on this
occasion Mr. Martin said:

"It was not merely bear-baiting and sports of a similar character that
he wished to abolish; there were other practices, equally cruel, with
which he thou