His own example is powerfully instructive. “If I am fatigued with overwork, personally, my food is very simple. I eat the raisins instead of drinking the wine.... I should join issue at once with those people who believe that intellectual work cannot be so well done without wine or alcohol. I should deny that proposition and hold the very opposite.” In the life of James Hinton, by Ellice Hopkins, to which Sir William Gull has contributed a preface, we learn another secret of a popular physician’s endurance in the record of early constitutionals in the parks and remote suburbs, from six to eight in the morning. In 1882, in the controversy on Vivisection, Sir William Gull, writing in the _Nineteenth Century_, showed that his sympathy with the struggles of physiologists for their science was combined with a fully answering appreciation of the value of physiological research to medicine. “Yearly in this country,” he says, “more than twenty thousand persons, children and others—mostly children—die of scarlet fever; and nearly twenty thousand more of typhoid fever; and one of the chief causes of this mortality is the high temperature of the blood, which results from the disturbance due to the fever process. No wonder therefore that physiologists and physicians have anxiously and laboriously occupied themselves in investigating that mechanism of the living body which in health maintains so constant a temperature under varying circumstances, both internal and external, and which becomes so easily and fatally deranged in disease.... The febrile state must have arrested attention from the infancy of man. The mothers of a palæolithic age must have watched their children consumed to death in it, as do the mothers of to-day. The name of this fiery state is as old as literature.... This fiery furnace, with its uncounted millions of victims, science hopes to close.” “There is no doubt that physiological experiments are useful, useful for animals as well as for man. They are therefore justifiable.... Nothing is so cruel as ignorance. For how many centuries had human sufferers to bear pain which is now preventable by better knowledge? How many thousands festered to death in small-pox before the discovery of vaccination? How many are now dying of tubercle and scrofula whom a better knowledge of their conditions might rescue? Yet the pursuit of this knowledge is hindered in England by the outcry of cruelty—the cruelty being no more than the inoculation of some of the lower animals with tubercular and scrofulous matter, in order to study the course of the disease and the modes of prevention. The cruelty obviously lies, not in performing these experiments, but in the hindering of progressive knowledge.” CHAPTER XX. _SIR JAMES PAGET AND SURGICAL PATHOLOGY._