dening
inventions of science? How indeed! Are we made better men by being
whirled about the globe by machinery, by the increased opportunities for
limitless volubility, or by the ingenious devices for mutual destruction?
And how are we morally advantaged by the knowledge of the infinite depths
of space, the composition of the stars and the motions of the planets?

The old Persian, when his far-travelled offspring returned with these
wonders to tell, replied: "My son, thou sayest that one star spinneth
about another star; let it spin!"

And Ruskin once remarked: "Newton explained why an apple fell, but he
never thought of explaining the exactly correlative, but infinitely more
difficult question, how the apple got up there."

The dead and dreary law of gravitation made it fall, but the glorious law
of life, known only to God, drew it up out of the earth and hung it in
all its inexplicable wonder high in the air.

And I think herein is a very good parable applicable to ourselves and our
age.

Science has found out that everything in the Universe is falling towards
everything else, or trying to do so, and we are so absorbed in this
deciduous discovery that we have forgotten to look up and observe the
lovely things about us that by God's mercy have still escaped the
withering touch of scientific knowledge.

But Science has now moved beyond the comparatively innocuous accumulation
of mechanical discoveries, and advancing into the domain of morals, has
emerged in the sinister aspect of the defender of cruelty.

This may yet prove an usurpation that will lead to its ultimate
deposition and ignominy. A time is coming when mankind will have no ear
for the advocates of what all the great and good and wise have denounced
as wicked.

If Science comes before the world declaring that cruelty is necessary for
its advance, the world will one day tell Science that it can stop where
it is.

In the meanwhile that there can be no doubt in the mind of any man as to
how the greatest leaders of thought and loftiest teachers of conduct have
united in their condemnation of vivisection, I have thought it timely to
bring them together, a noble array, in this book.

CHAPTER I: THE SEVENTH EARL OF SHAFTESBURY, K.G.
FIRST PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY

[Picture: The seventh Earl of Shaftesbury, K.G. From an engraving by W.
J. Edwards after Frederick Sandys]

The seventh Earl of Sha