The Academy of last week contains a paragraph on the
question as to the reality of spontaneous combustion, recently discussed at the Societe de Chirurgie de Paris, which concludes thus :— " Again, after injection made into the veins of animals, as of dogs, it was found impossible to effect their combustion." Does this mean that the veins of living dogs were injected by the Paris doctors with great quantities of alcohol,—itself, we believe, a process of genuine torture,—and that then, while still living, the effort was made to set them on fire, to try whether they were inflammable? We fear, from the known indifference of the French vivisectors to the sufferings they inflict, that that is exactly what it means, though we hope it may not be so. And we greatly fear that English science is rapidly becoming more and more indifferent to such cruelties, so long as they offer the slightest hope of the minutest pathological discovery. We can, of course, distinguish between the motive of the cabman who, the other day, roasted a rat alive, and the pathologist who tries to set a living dog on fire,—supposing that was what was done,— but the man who would do the latter from an almost empty scien- tific curiosity as to the possibility of spontaneous combustion, would justly be regarded by the perpetrator of the former wicked- ness, as setting him a very good example of utter indifference to the agony be inflicted. We wish that our English contemporaries —especially when of so high calibre as the Academy—would not retail such experiments without even a word of condemnation. The scientific idea seems to be that a grain of possible knowledge is cheaply bought by any number of agonising animal martyrdoms.
Previous page
