Vivisection Rejected

The London Animals' Friend

Following are a few extracts from the last public address of Lawson Tait, the greatest English surgeon, at St. James Hall, London.

"I reached this platform [anti-vivisection] some seventeen or eighteen years ago. . . . I had to submit to a deep humiliation, for it was no small matter for an ambitious young man of twenty-four or twenty-five to acknowledge that he had been wrong in his published conclusions, and admit that his experiments were not only utterly wrong, but mischievous and misleading. I was humiliated. . . .

"But the result was a pamphlet which I issued on the uselessness of experimentation upon animals for any purpose that you can imagine.

"I went to the records of medicine and surgery and found out how futile all the illustrations were.

"There is no condition of experimentation possible, with the influence of anæsthesia, from which just conclusions can be formed! The thing is ridiculous. It is a reduction ad absurdum. Your 'patient' must be either conscious or unconscious; if it is unconscious the experiment is admittedly 'worthless;' if it is conscious its nervous system is so stimulated, and it is so upset by the torture, that no truth can be arrived at.

"I move this resolution:—

"That this meeting wholly disapprove of experimentation on living animals, as being crude in conception, unscientific in its nature, and incapable of being sustained by any accurate or beneficent results applicable to man."

This was seconded by Dr. Wall, in a telling speech, and carried.

The London Animals' Friend.

All men freely admit that there is such a thing as human principle, and that this principle properly applied will always produce uniform results. Why not, then, admit that there is a divine Principle, high above the human, and that the proper application of this Principle is productive of uniformly good results?

Solomon said, "Keep thy heart with all diligence; for out of it are the issues of life."

In other words, Watch and pray with unceasing diligence, for thus only can our consciousness be kept in unison with God, who is Life, and in whom no death is.

God is the Soul of the universe. A Soul-less universe would be no universe,—a thing inconceivable.

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