The _Idlers_ that sport only with inanimate nature may claim some indulgence; if they are useless, they are still innocent; but there are others, whom I know not how to mention without more emotion than my love of quiet willingly admits. Among the inferior professors of medical knowledge is a race of wretches whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty; whose favourite amusement is to nail dogs to tables and open them alive; to try how long life may be continued in various degrees of mutilation, or with the excision or laceration of the vital parts; to examine whether burning irons are felt more acutely by the bone or tendon; and whether the more lasting agonies are produced by poison forced into the mouth, or injected into the veins, it is not without reluctance that I offend the sensibility of the tender mind with images like these. If such cruelties were not practised it were to be desired that they should not be conceived; but, since they are published every day with ostentation, let me be allowed once to mention them, since I mention them with abhorrence. _Mead_ has invidiously remarked of _Woodward_ that he gathered shells and stones, and would pass for a philosopher. With pretentions much less reasonable the anatomical novice tears out the living bowels of an animal and styles himself physician, prepares himself by familiar cruelty for that profession which he is to exercise upon the tender and the helpless, upon feeble bodies and broken minds, and by which he has opportunities to extend his arts and torture, and continue those experiments upon infancy and age, which he has hitherto tried upon cats and dogs. What is alleged in defence of these hateful practices everyone knows, but the truth is that by knives, fire, and poisons, knowledge is not always sought, and is very seldom attained. I know not that by living dissections any discovery has been made by which a single malady is more easily cured. And if the knowledge of physiology has been somewhat increased, he surely buys knowledge dear who learns the use of the lacteals at the expense of his own humanity. It is time that a universal resentment should arise against those horrid operations, which tend to harden the heart and make the physician more dreadful than the gout or the stone. CHAPTER VIII: THOMAS CARLYLE VICE-PRESIDENT OF THE NATIONAL ANTI-VIVISECTION SOCIETY The world of letters and of ethics has hardly yet settled whether much of the teaching of the Sage of Chelsea should be the subject of praise or blame.