We are not, then, addressing ourselves to vegetarians, but to those anti-vivisectionists who feel no compunction in drinking broth or milk or eating the wing of a chicken, who do not shrink with horror from the sight of a cutlet, and who are capable of eating meat twice a day throughout the whole term of their existence. These people know full well that it was necessary to kill the animal which serves them for food: the ox was beaten to death; the sheep had its throat cut open; the pig was bled to death; the cod and the sardine were suffocated. I pass over the tortures which special preparations and elegant sports inflict on the animal for the mere savour of our meals: geese stuffed by force for months whilst nailed down to boards; pheasants, partridges, hares, slaughtered in the hunt; fish thrown into boats, gasping and finally dying after long, agonising struggles. All these and other tortures are inflicted by man on the animal in order to satisfy his pleasure and his appetite. Perhaps these anti-vivisectionists have never visited a slaughter-house when the moment for killing the sheep has arrived. There, bound and stretched out on an immense table, are to be seen five hundred unfortunate sheep, with their throats thrust forth. The butcher passes in front and, with a stroke of his knife, slashes open the neck and throat of the poor wretches; the blood spouts out, convulsions rend the body, and only at the end of one minute or one and a half minutes does death supervene. This is death in all its savage horror inflicted by man on the animal. There are anti-vivisectionists who accept this. Therefore, they recognise implicitly man's right to kill animals, since they profit by such slaughter for their alimentation; they add, however, that though man has a right to kill, he has no right to cause suffering. Is there no suffering in the slaughter-house? Are anæsthetics ever dreamt of there? 2. Now it is impossible to point out the boundary line which separates the being that suffers from the being that does not suffer; and I defy any one to establish any line of demarcation whatsoever between a being capable of pain and a being incapable of pain. Plants certainly do not suffer. Already, however, there are certain difficulties in the way of determining the exact boundary line between the animal and the plant. When we expose an infusion of hay to the air, for instance, various microbes develop therein. A learned and minute analysis allows us to distinguish both bacteria and infusoria among the innumerable micro-organisms which swarm in the infusion. Now we know that bacteria are plants and infusoria are animals. If, therefore, all animal life were eliminated from experimentation, we should have no right to boil an infusion of hay, because we know that it contains infusoria which are animals.