Page:Popular Science Monthly Volume 26.djvu/667

 be filled and emptied through these doors with great rapidity. In order to hold as many animals as possible without discomfort to them, the cage is divided into two divisions or tiers, the flooring of the upper tier being freely perforated with openings, so as to establish a communication



between the upper and lower divisions, and allow a due distribution of the gases and vapors used. The cage runs on four eight-inch wheels, which are underneath it, and ply on galvanized iron rails.

The mode of death to which the animals are subject is that by anæsthesia, not by suffocation or asphyxia. Physiologically, there is a distinctive difference between these modes of death. Death by anæsthesia is death by sleep; death by asphyxia is death by deprivation of air. Death by anæsthesia is typically represented in death by chloroform; death by asphyxia is typically represented in drowning, or in immersion in carbonic-acid gas. When properly carried out, death by anæsthesia is by far the most certain and least violent of the two processes, although both are probably painless. It is worthy of record, however, that all animals are not equally susceptible to the action of the narcotic vapors. Cats, for instance, lie asleep much longer than dogs before they cease to breathe. They fall into sleep as rapidly as dogs, but do not pass so quickly into the final sleep. There is a difference between different animals of the same kind. Some dogs die almost instantly—in fact, as they fall asleep; others fall asleep and continue to sleep for several minutes before they cease to live. In the first observations, before I had rendered the narcotic atmosphere over-poweringly active for all cases, there were a few instances, nine in the first seven hundred, in which the animals slept on from half an hour until an hour after all their comrades had died. Finding out this strange peculiarity, I increased the amount of narcotic vapor until all succumbed very nearly at the same minute, and in the last six thousand there has been no recurrence of the prolonged insensibility. The animals are now commonly all asleep in from two to three