TO LYDIA MARIA CHILD.
Who knows thy love most royal power,
With largess free and brave,
Which crowns the helper of the poor,
The suffering and the slave.
Yet springs as freely and as warm,
To greet the near and small,
The prosy neighbor at the farm,
The squirrel on the wall.
Eliza Scudder.
VIVISECTION.
It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless matter, against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify, not merely taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into a misfortune which we denounce as a misconception of the relations between the higher and lower creatures. A hundred years ago had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing them, they would have been only on a level with their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind the age.