Page:The moral aspects of vivisection (IA 101694999.nlm.nih.gov).pdf/8

 morbid and pastimes so atrocious! "Some forty years ago," as a very eminent gentleman reminds me, "the then Duke of St. Alban's, being Hereditary Grand Falconer, bethought him that he would try a little hawking, and he flew a hawk at a heron, Society and all the newspapers rose up in arms and denounced him for his cruelty. That sort of field sport was not customary;" and so it was regarded with horror.

Yet such indifference to suffering as we have imagined in our hypothetical cases of artists, or sanitary reformers, or cooks, or sportsmen, would, on the whole, be less monstrous and anomalous than the passion for Vivisection among the men of science; and this for two noticeable reasons: In the first place, artists, sportamen, and bon-vivants, know comparatively little of the nature and extent of the suffering caused by lacerations of the living tissues, or the production of morbid conditions, while the physiologists understand the matter to a nicety, and have the most perfect acquaintance with every pain which they cause—nay, whose causation is often the immediate object of their ingenious exertions. As the writer of a most admirable letter, bearing the well-known signature of "Lewis Carrol," published in the Pall Mall Gazette, Feb. 12th, expressed it: “ What man teach the noble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to every form of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is? Can the man who has once realized by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being? A little while ago we should have confidently replied, 'He cannot do it.' In the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess he can." Again, in a still more marked way the acts of the vivisectors are anomalous and out of