Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/50

38 They cannot have taken note of such typical examples as the utterly useless barbarity of Senn of Philadelphia, setting ﬁre to a dog that he had pumped full of hydrogen gas, before the Medical Congress of Berlin in 1890. Nor the experiments in massage on a series of large disjointed dogs, performed in Professor Charles Richet's Paris laboratory, not only with the permission, but with the consultative advice, of that gentleman. A set of more unjustifiable experiments were never devised.

Yet these are only examples of frequently occurring atrocities, where vivisection is unchecked. Certainly no body of honourable English physicians who are in the habit of reading Les Archives Générales de Médecine would fail to condemn such fallacious experiments, where the pretence of anæsthesia served to diminish the resistance of the victims—not to annihilate pain. Yet such cruelties inevitably result from free vivisection.

Factors in Human Nature.

It must never be forgotten that gambling excitement, or the spirit of undue emulation, exists in all classes of men—in biological investigators