XXIX

7975.

You may remember, Brothers, that last week we
had just come (under the heading, Cruelty) to the
question of vivisection. There is a great deal of
very strong feeling in our Society on that question,
and one cannot wonder at it. I may say at once
that I myself have no sort of sympathy with it, that
I consider the whole thing to be wrong—to be
, absolutely the wrong way to approach what the
doctors desire to gain by it; but at the same time I
think that it is well for us to bear in mind that there
are very different kinds of this thing, showing very
different degrees of criminality, though all of them
have the same great and vital objection to them—
namely, that the whole principle oT the thing is wrong.
In the books of the Anti-vivisection Society you will
read all kinds of perfectly ghastly and obviously use-
less horrors, things that people have done merely out
of morbid curiosity—as, for example, to see exactly to
what degree of temperature an animal can be baked
before certain functions disappear, and all" sorts of
horrible things like that. One must supppse that the
men who do such things are not actually cruel inside,