We omitted to notice last week the account of the
horrible experiments made in France on the starvation of dogs, by way of supplementing the information supposed to be conveyed by the recent observations on the fasting-men. Nothing can be more cruel than to keep one dog without either food or water, and another without food though supplied with water, just to see how much longer the one which is not tormented with thirst as well as hunger, will survive its sufferings, than the one tormented in both ways. We would not willingly touch the hand of a man who would inflict, from what is called a scientific motive, such shocking and wilful, as well as fruitless suffering. As Miss Cobbe said, in an admirable letter to Tuesday's Pall Mall Gazette :—" Such interest' as these experiments possess is, I venture to say, very much on a par with that which a naughty schoolboy takes in clipping off one fly's wings and seeing that it can crawl but can no longer fly, and cutting off the legs of another and noting that it can fly but no longer crawl. We give the schoolboy a lecture or a box on the ear, but we clap our hands in applause when, ten years older, he calls himself a man of science, and does worse things with just as much or as little reason." The fasting-men know what they intend to suffer, and why, and that they can, if they choose, suspend their own sufferings at any moment; but a wretched dog, hoping for its accustomed food and water whenever a human being approaches its place of confinement, and doomed to endless disappointments, is not even competent to know that its hopes are all vain, and founded on a trust in humanity which its owners intend to betray.
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