het. HE HAD BECOME CALLOUS. He found
torment "an interesting occupation, under the name of Science." May
there not be others in our day to whom the same criticism is only too
applicable?

One of the English critics of the abuses of vivisection a century ago
was Dr. John Abernethy of London, a Lecturer on Physiology at the
Royal College of Surgeons, the founder of the medical school attached
to St. Bartholomew's Hospital, and the most distinguished surgeon in
Great Britain during the first quarter of the nineteenth century.
Abernethy was by no means an antivivisectionist; he insisted upon the
utility of certain demonstrations, but he was profoundly opposed to
those cruelties of research which, in our day, by the modern school of
physiologists, are either forgotten or condoned. curiously enough,
one of his strongest utterances against such cruelty was made in one
of his lectures on physiology. Therein he said:

"There is one point I feel it a duty to advert to. Mr. Hunter, whom I
should not have believed to have been very scrupulous about inflicting
suffering upon animals, nevertheless censures Spallanzani for the
unmeaning repetition of similar experiments. Having resolved publicly
to express my own opinions with regard to the subject, I choose the
present opportunity, BECAUSE I BELIEVE SPALLANZANI TO HAVE BEEN ONE OF
THOSE WHO HAVE TORTURED AND DESTROYED ANIMALS IN VAIN. I do not
perceive that in the two principal subjects which he has sought to
elucidate he has added any important fact to our stock of knowledge;
and, besides, some of his experiments are of a nature that a good man
would blush to think of, and a wise man would have been ashamed to
publish."[1]

[1] "Physiological Lectures," London, 1817, p. 164.

This is a unique expression. One may be absolutely certain that no
professor of physiology during the past forty years has thus openly
condemned in a physiology lecture any of his contemporaries for the
cruelty of their experiments.

In his Life of Abernethy, his biographer, Dr. Macilwain, refers to
experiments upon living animals, "WHICH ARE SO REVOLTING FROM THEIR
CRUELTY, that the mind recoils from the contemplation of them." This,
too, is a noteworthy utterance, coming from one who was a
distinguished London surgeon and a Fellow of the Royal Society. In a
subsequent work entitled "Remarks on Vivisection," published some
seventeen years before the date ascribed by Professor Bowditch as that
m