MONKEYS' BRAINS.
[TO TAZ EDITOIA OF THE "SPECTATOR."]
Szn,—Dr. Berdoe has no doubt justly defined the actual bodily pain endured by the monkeys mentioned in my former letter. Any reader, however, who will devote an hour to the perusal of the reports of the experiments in question in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1875, and again for 1884, will, I think, agree with me that the horror of such researches is not limited to the direct pain they occasion. It will be found that they consist in the gradual destruction of intelligence itself, in the reduction of animated, happy, agile creatures to a condition of stupidity, terror, palsy, and blindness. It was not body but mind which was cruelly killed. Perception, volition, intelligence, and affection were obliterated piecemeal, as the brains were sliced away, or made (in Professor Goltz's phrase) to resemble a "newly hoed. potato-field."
Claude Bernard confessed that he could not vivisect a. monkey; its gestures were too like those of a human child in misery. But these English vivisectors betray no trace of such squeamishness ; they even describe the behaviour of their helpless victims with a certain jocosity, as if it were an amusing spectacle. They mention their " sprawling " after mutilation, and "knocking their heads in every direction,' "coming full tilt with the snout against the door," and so on, Speaking of a monkey which they had rendered blind, they tell us that "if startled by sounds or attempts to lay hold of it, it would look terrified, and lay hold of whatever lay in its. path." But extracts such as these fail to convey the cumulative impression of these Philosophical Transactions. I can only say that, case-hardened as I am to the horrors of vivisection,. there was something so portentous, so ghastly, in this record at deliberate destruction of mind, that when—after spending some hours over the volume in the library of the British Museum—I came out into the sunshine of that noble portico,. I felt dazed and sick, and needed to pause and recover myself before I could walk in the streets.
It may be well to remark that, in the above-named Philo- sophical Transactions of the Royal Society for 1884, in the paper by David Ferrier and Gerald Yeo, there is a prefatory note in which we read :—" The facts recorded in this paper are partly the results of a research made conjointly by Drs. Ferrier and Yeo, and partly of a research made by Dr. Ferrier alone." These are the experiments for performing, which, without licence, the Victoria Street Societyprosecuted Professor Ferrier at Bow Street in November, 1881, the prosecution being based on the reports in the British Medical Journal and Lancet, in each of which the experiments were directly attributed to' Professor Ferrier. The prosecution broke down when Dr. Roy, the reporter for the British Medical Journal, swore that the experiments had been performed by Professor Yeo, and the editor of the Lancet stated that his reporter, Professor Gamgee, if examined, would say "precisely what was said by Dr. Roy."
Three years after this scene in Bow Street, Drs. Ferrier and Yeo cynically confess, as we have just seen, in the Transac- tions of the Royal Society, that they performed the experi- ments "conjointly," and in their partnership Professor Ferrier's name is placed foremost.. And with this experience in our memories, we are taunted with the failure of our prose- cution (which had not, we are told, "a tittle of evidence to go. upon"), and we are challenged to accept as unquestionable the statistics of vivisection furnished to Parliament by the Inspector, and avowedly based on the returns made by the vivisectors themselves ; of whom Messrs. Ferrier, Yeo, and Roy are among the most eminent. —I am, Sir, &c., [Our correspondent raises an entirely different question to' that raised by the debate. We heartily agree with her that the slow and deliberate destruction of intelligence, or at least of its manifestation, in any animal, and more especially in animals of a high relative intelligence, has something in it
more shocking and revolting than even the infliction of severe pain. But the Act of 1876 unfortunately recognised no such principle, and the point we raised was as to the statement freely made in the debate that the restrictions imposed by the Act of 1876 are not observed.—En. Spectator.]
Previous page
