Page:The Harveian oration, 1893.djvu/62

38 discoveries in physics, or in chemistry, without laboratories and experiments? Do not botanists investigate the functions of plants by dissection, by microscopic and chemical investigation, and by experiment? Have we not this very year celebrated the important results of fifty years’ experimental researches into the life and growth of plants by Lawes and Gilbert? And is it not obvious that the same necessary well-tried and indispensable method of inquiry must be continued in the case of animals? Happily the same experimental science has discovered the means of abolishing the tribute of suffering which the brute creation paid in the hands of Harvey and Hales, of Haller, Magendie, and Sir Charles Bell. By means of chloroform and other anesthetics, and by means of the antiseptic methods which we owe to Sir Joseph Lister, the subjects of experiment are spared the pain and shock of an operation, and the pain