“When a large and gentle Ox, after having resisted a ten times greater force of blows than would have killed his murderers, falls stunned at last, and his armed head is fastened to the ground with cords; as soon as the wide wound is made, and the jugular veins are cut asunder, what mortal can, without horror and compassion, hear the painful bellowings, intercepted by his flow of blood, the bitter sighs that speak the sharpness of his anguish, and the deep-sounding groans with loud anxiety, fetched from the bottom of his strong and palpitating heart. Look on the trembling and violent convulsions of his limbs; see, whilst his reeking gore streams from him, his eyes become dim and languid, and behold his strugglings, gasps, and last efforts for life. “When a being has given such convincing and undeniable proofs of terror and of pain and agony, is there a disciple of Descartes so inured to blood, as not to refute, by his commiseration, the philosophy of that vain reasoner?”[216] In his previous essay, _On the Conduct of Men to Inferior Animals_, Nicholson has collected from various writers, both humane and inhumane, a fearful catalogue of atrocities of different kinds perpetrated upon his helpless dependants by the being who delights to boast himself (at least in civilised countries) to be made “in the image and likeness of God.” Among these the hellish tortures of the vivisectionists and “pathologists” hold, perhaps, the bad pre-eminence, but the cruel tortures of the Slaughter-House come very near to them in wanton atrocity. XXXVII. ABERNETHY. 1763-1831. Distinguished as a practical surgeon and as a physiologist, Abernethy has earned his lasting reputation as having been one of the first to attack the old prejudice of the profession as to the origin of diseases, and as having sought for such origin, not in mere local and accidental but, in general causes--in the constitution and habits of the body. A pupil of John Hunter, in 1786 he became assistant surgeon at St. Bartholomew’s Hospital, and shortly afterwards he lectured on anatomy and surgery at that institution, which to his ability and genius owes the fame which it acquired as a school of surgery. As a lecturer he had a reputation and popularity seldom or perhaps never before so well earned in the medical schools--founded, as they were, upon a rare penetration and logical method, united with clearness and perspicuity in communicating his convictions. In honesty, integrity, and in the domestic virtues his character was unimpeachable, but the gentleness of deportment for which he was noted in his home he was far from exhibiting in public and towards his patients. His roughness and even coarseness of manner in dealing with capricious valetudinarians, indeed, became notorious.