In Science, there is no one method that can be considered indispensable. Attributes are indispensable; observation, industry, accuracy are indispensable; methods are not. Methods may be convenient, they may be useful, they may be expedient, but nothing more. Celsus tells us that Erasistratus and the school he founded laid open the bodies of criminals in order to study by direct observation, the action of the intestinal organs during existence. The act at that date of civilization probably shocked no one; it was no doubt in accord with the spirit of the time. In a day not very remote from our own, a criminal sentenced to death for some trivial crime, was given over to William Cheselden, surgeon to George the First, for experiment. The criminal was deaf and the experiment intended was that of making a puncture through the drum of the ear, in order to discover if an opening through the drum would enable the deaf to hear. At the last moment, Cheselden, a man of fine feeling, and brilliant as an operating surgeon, declined the experiment, on which the criminal, whose life had been conditionally spared, was set free. For his generosity of mind, for shrinking from an experiment on another human being, Cheselden lost caste at Court, and was considered pitiable by those who lived on courtly favours. The argument is taking now the same direction against experiments by man conducted on the lower animals for the purposes of discovery; and when from the history of the past we gather what has been achieved by such experiments, there is but one answer--namely: that such experiments, although they may achieve what was expected of them, were not indispensable. They may have expedited discovery; they may have led to discovery; but they were not indispensable. --------------------- In the discovery of anaesthesia, general and local, painful experiment on animals has played no indispensable part whatever. The lower animals have been permitted to share, more than equally with man, in the blessing of anaesthetic discovery, for by it, many of them have been saved the agonies of painful death, but they have (not) been subjected to painful experiment in the course of discovery.... The instauration of general anaesthesia came from experiments made on man alone. There is no suspicion of any experiment on a lower animal in connection with it.... On the contrary, there is a most notable fact in relation to experiments under chloroform made on lower animals, which suggests that if they had ever been relied on,--chloroform would never have been introduced into practice. Flourens, the eminent French physiologist, tried the effect of chloroform on inferior animals, and in consequence of its powerful and fatal influence on them, put it aside as an anaesthetic. --------------------- There are methods of producing local insensibility to pain which have been tried, and which deserve notice.