hould understand that they are extracts
only, and that they represent but one aspect of the speaker's views.
Perhaps they are the more valuable in that they are the utterances of
the most pronounced American critic of antivivisection of the present
time.

THE LIMITATIONS AND ERRORS OF THE VIVISECTIONISTS

The first that strikes one is an exaggeration of the importance and
extent of the vivisection method. As valuable an aid as it is, it is
not the only, and perhaps it is not the chief, method of ascertaining
medical truth. It has without doubt often been used when other
methods would have been productive of more certain results. This has
arisen from what a large and broad culture of the human mind perceives
to flow from a recent and rather silly hypertrophy of the scientific
method, and a limitation of that method to altogether too material or
physical aspects of the problem....

Almost every point over which the controversy has raged most fiercely
has been in relation to one or all of the three or four questions:

1. What is a vivisection experiment?
2. By whom should it be performed?
3. For what purpose should it be performed?
4. By what methods should it be carried out?

In reference to all of these questions, scientific men should unite
and establish a common set of principles or answers. In my judgment
their failure to do so at all, and besides this, their frequent
exaggeration of logical limits and just calims, has been one of the
unfortunate causes of useless and wasteful wrangling.....

(2) I believe scientific men have made a grave mistake in opposing the
limitations of vivisection (not mortisection) experimentation to those
fitted by education and position to properly choose and properly
execute such experimentations. No harm can come, and I believe much
good would come, from our perfect readiness to accede to, nay, to
advocate, the antivivisectionist desire to limit all experimentations
to chartered institutions or to such private investigators as might be
selected by a properly chosen authority.... At present the greatest
harm is done true science by men who conduct experiments without
preliminary knowledge to choose, without judgement to carry out,
withoutout true scientific training or method, and only in the
interest of vanity. It takes a deal of true science and patience to
neutralize with good and to wash out of the memory the sickening,
goading sense of shame that follows the know