“And we may venture to repeat, that not only must the experimental method be continued, but the progress of physiology will chiefly depend on the increased application of that method. The more involved and abstruse the problems become, the more necessary does it also become that the inquirer should be able to choose his own conditions for the observations he desires to make. Happily, the experimental method itself brings with it in the course of its own development the power of removing the only valid objection to physiological experiments, viz., that in certain cases they involve pain and suffering. For in nearly all experiments pain and suffering are disturbing elements. These disturbing elements the present imperfect methods are often unable to overcome; but their removal will become a more and more pressing necessity in the interests of the experiments themselves, as the science becomes more exact and exacting, and will also become a more and more easy task as the progress of the science makes the investigator more and more master of the organism. In the physiology of the future, pain and suffering will be admissible in an experiment only when pain and suffering are themselves the object of inquiry. And such an inquiry will of necessity take a subjective rather than an objective form.”[1061]

Let the President of the Royal College of Physicians give his views of the utility of vivisection from the point of view of a practical physician:—

Sir Andrew Clark before the “Clinical Society of London” (British Medical Journal, Feb. 3, 1883) said: “For whatever purpose they may be employed; however carefully they may be designed and executed; however successful may be the precautions taken to exclude error, experiments have their subtle difficulties and dangers which are perilous to truth, and cannot be wholly averted. By the prestige of precision, which often undeservedly they profess, undue weight is attached to their results; and by the assumption that in like conditions the results would be the same in man as in the lower animals, flagrant errors are committed, and currency is given to false or inadequate generalisations. The experimenter interprets the results of his experiments by the light of their structural results; he forgets or he ignores the life-history of the processes by which they have been evolved, and he takes no account of the fact, beyond controversy, that different clinical states find occasionally the same structural expression. In such circumstances doubt is inevitable, and it is only to clinical medicine that any just appeal for its solution can be made. To her, at last, all such experiments must be brought for trial; she must be their examiner, critic, interpreter, user, and judge. And no results of experiments can be made of any avail to medicine, or be used with safety in her service, until they have been filtered through the checks and counter-checks of clinical experience, and have responded to the tests and counter-tests of clinical trial. Had these principles exerted their just influence in the recent debates concerning questions of this kind, we should not have had a seton in the neck of a man taken as the parallel of a seton in the neck of a guinea-pig; we should not have had the artificial tuberculosis of the rodent pronounced to be identical with the natural tuberculosis of the child; we should not have had grey tubercles and caseous pneumonias pronounced on the grounds of mere likeness of structure to be of one and the same nature; and we should have been spared the sight of science, drunken with success and drivelling with prophecies, soliciting the public on the common highway.”

APPENDIX.
ON SOME OF THE MORE IMPORTANT MINERALS USED IN MEDICINE.

(Compiled chiefly from Royle’s Materia Medica.)

Carbonate of Soda is the neter of the Hebrews. It was known to the early Hindus, and is by them called Sajji noon (i.e. Sajji or Soda Salt); it is the Sagimen vitri of Geber. The Natron lakes of Egypt were known to the ancients, and it was early employed in glass making, etc. (Royle). On the shores of the Indian Ocean, the Red Sea, and the Mediterranean, plants of the order Chenopodeæ are burned to form the ash called Barilla, and from this ash soda is obtained. Carbonate of soda was also formerly prepared on the coasts of Scotland, Ireland, Wales, and Normandy, by burning algæ or sea-weeds, and the ash so obtained was called kelp. There is no doubt that the process is extremely ancient, and the discovery of the properties of these ashes accidental.

Chloride of Sodium, or common salt, is so universally distributed that it must have been known and used in food from the earliest ages.

Borax is thought to have been the Chrysocolla of Pliny. It is the Sohaga of the Hindus (Sanscrit, Tincana), and is called Booruk by the Arabs. It is abundant on the shores of some of the lakes in Thibet, and was brought into India across the Himalayas (Royle).

Sulphate of Soda, or Glauber’s Salt, is found on the soil in India and other countries, and exists in the ashes of many plants, in mineral springs, and in sea-water.