For this reason it is perhaps unscientific to assert that any particular form of cruelty to animals is _worse_ than another form; the truth is, that each of these hydra-heads, the offspring of one parent stem, has its own proper characteristic, and is different, not worse or better than the rest. To flesh-eating belongs the proud distinction of causing a greater bulk of animal suffering than any other habit whatsoever; to sport, the meed of unique and unparalleled brutality; while the patrons of murderous millinery afford the most marvellous instance of the capacity the human mind possesses for ignoring its personal responsibilities. To re-apply Keats’s words: “For them the Ceylon diver held his breath, And went all naked to the hungry shark; For them his ears gush’d blood; for them in death The seal on the cold ice with piteous bark Lay full of darts; for them alone did seethe A thousand men in troubles wide and dark; Half ignorant, they turn’d an easy wheel, That set sharp racks at work, to pinch and peel.” CHAPTER VII. EXPERIMENTAL TORTURE. Great is the change when we turn from the easy, thoughtless indifferentism of the sportsman or the milliner to the more determined and deliberately chosen attitude of the scientist--so great, indeed, that by many people, even among professed champions of animals’ rights, it is held impossible to trace such dissimilar lines of action to one and the same source. Yet it can be shown, I think, that in this instance, as in those already examined, the prime cause of man’s injustice to the lower animals is the belief that they are mere automata, devoid alike of spirit, character, and individuality; only, while the ignorant sportsman expresses this contempt through the medium of the battue, and the milliner through that of the bonnet, the more seriously-minded physiologist works his work in the “experimental torture” of the laboratory. The difference lies in the temperament of the men, and in the tone of their profession; but in their denial of the most elementary rights of the lower races, they are all inspired and instigated by one common prejudice. The analytical method employed by modern science tends ultimately, in the hands of its most enlightened exponents, to a recognition of the close relationship between mankind and the animals; but incidentally it has exercised a most sinister effect on the study of the _jus animalium_ among the mass of average men. For consider the dealings of the so-called naturalist with the animals whose nature he makes it his business to observe! In ninety-nine cases out of a hundred, he is wholly unappreciative of the distinctive quality, the individuality, of the subject of his investigations, and becomes nothing more than a contented accumulator of facts, an industrious dissector of carcasses.