Page:Blackwell 1898 Scientific method in biology.pdf/39

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VI.
RESTRICTION OF EXPERIMENT.

WHEN we investigate the popular or ethical aspect of so-called scientific research, made upon living animals, we are at once met by facts which imperatively demand both serious thought and determined action, if we would not be participators in the degradation of human conscience. We are confronted with the enormous increase in such experiments which has taken place within the last thirty years, as well as in the severity of the sufferings inflicted. This increase is going on in England as well as in foreign countries.[1] It is growing in many cases, not only without any benefit to the human race,

  1. Thus, the authorities of Paris ordered twenty friendless dogs to be tied to the branches of trees in a wood, and a shell made in the municipal laboratory exploded amongst them, riddling and mangling them fearfully.