Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 16.djvu/63

Rh and happily even these are generally productive rather of discomfort than of pain. Let me give you an example of such a vivisection, far more painful than the immense majority of those of the laboratory. Suppose a country surgeon were sent for late at night to some case of urgent peril; knowing that his ride is for life or death, and unsparing of himself or his horse, he rides him to the utmost limits of endurance, and beyond: who would not applaud the action? Those only who appear deliberately to believe that our life is worth less than that of many sparrows, those legislators only who look forward to the time when wars will cease, not because of human slaughter, of devastated homes, of all the horrors which the world has endured for centuries, but because of the cruelties to which the horses in the artillery are subjected. We, who are familiar with human suffering and sorrow, which our knowledge is all too feeble to prevent, best understand how, in testing some new remedy on a less precious fellow creature than a man, one who is truly humane may be tempted to forget the comparatively trivial suffering of a rabbit or a frog.

But some enthusiastic opponent will say: "I can not pretend to doubt that these experiments are in every sense of the word useful; but we ought not to purchase the benefit they confer by inflicting pain upon innocent creatures. I would sign a petition to-morrow to put down all field sports by law, I would allow no operation upon domestic animals, and I will abstain from all animal food until I am certain that I can eat creatures which have been killed without suffering pain. But if I were lying at the point of death, and you brought an animal to my bedside and assured me that by putting it to pain my life would be saved, I would refuse to purchase it on such cruel terms." We may hope that the excellent person who made this heroic profession would, in the hour of trial, be better advised, but if not we may surely reply: "Right reverend sir, you are the best judge of the value of your own life, and, if you think proper to sacrifice it to the comfort of a Guinea-pig, we must submit to the loss with such resignation as we can muster; but when you say that in obedience to this silly whim you will let your dearest friend suffer, allow the sacrifice of the most important life, and forbid those studies which have already rescued multitudes from deformity and misery and death, then those of us who have to do with the real responsibilities of life, and on whom presses the awful sense of impotence to which our defective science too often leaves us, answer that we too have duties to fulfill, and to the best of our power we mean conscientiously to fulfill them."

There is, I fear, another reason which animates much of the opposition to physiological experiments. It is nothing else than aversion from the methods and the results of science. It may be that an excuse for this dislike has been furnished by the pretense of false science, and the arrogance of much even which is true. But surely no reasonable creature, from such trivial irritation, can deliberately wish to