both offenses, and secondly that since in the one case their opinions are opposed to the practice of genteel society, and in the other to the convictions of all who are qualified to judge, they should at least contemplate the possibility of being mistaken. Putting the question of field sports altogether aside, you know perfectly well that in every village in England an extremely painful mutilation is constantly performed upon domestic animals in no registered laboratory, under no anæsthetics, and with no object but the convenience and profit of the owner. You remember how, when an epidemic threatened the destruction of valuable property, every booby peer now eager to stop, so far as in him lay, the advance of knowledge, was no less eager to have carried out at the public expense any slaughter and any experiments, painful or otherwise, which would save his pocket.
But you will say: All this seems reasonable enough; but if so, how do you account for the prejudice against you; what has induced so many amiable and otherwise sane persons to join in the outcry against physiology?
First, I answer, it is due to the most frequent cause of folly—ignorance. Many persons, supposed to be educated, are so destitute of the most ordinary conceptions of natural science that they do not understand the necessity for experiments. So little do they appreciate the difference between formal knowledge and real knowledge, that a distinguished statesman once assured me that he would as soon have his leg set by a man who had gained what he called his knowledge from books, as by one who had "walked the hospitals." Next, there is the vulgar dislike of whatever is not obviously and immediately useful. When knowledge for its own sake is in question, those of the baser sort are always ready to cry, with equal ignorance of literature and of science, "Cui bono?"
In another class of persons, less ignorant and less stupid than these two, opposition to physiological experiments appears to spring from what may fairly be stigmatized as sentiment, that is to say, excitable, rather than deep feeling, uncontrolled by reason. People first gratify their fancy by calling cats and dogs our fellow creatures, which, in one sense, undoubtedly they are, and then, by the familiar fallacy of an ambiguous middle term, argue that it is cruel to put our fellow creatures to pain; or, as some would add, to reduce them to slavery, or to use them in any way for our own, rather than their good. Such persons compel their fellow creatures to drag them through the streets, they eat their fellow creatures when sufficiently vivisected to be palatable, and then find philosophical excuses for those who kill their fellow creatures for fun. But they are properly shocked when their fellow creatures are hurt or killed for the benefit of mankind. Such persons have been accused of feminine weakness; but I must say that I never have found an intelligent woman who could not see the rights of the case when fairly explained to her, whereas I have met a few
