“The true vivisector must approach a difficult vivisection with the same joyful excitement, with the same delight, with which a surgeon undertakes a difficult operation, from which he expects extraordinary consequences. He who shrinks from cutting into a living animal, he who approaches a vivisection as a disagreeable necessity, may very likely be able to repeat one or two vivisections, but will never become an artist in vivisection. He who cannot follow some fine nerve-thread, scarcely visible to the naked eye, into the depths, if possible sometimes tracing it to a new branching, with joyful alertness for hours at a time; he who feels no enjoyment when at last, parted from its surroundings and isolated, he can subject that nerve to electrical stimulation; or when, in some deep cavity, guided only by the sense of touch of his finger-ends, he ligatures and divides an invisible vessel--to such a one there is wanting that which is most necessary for a successful vivisector. The pleasure of triumphing over difficulties held hitherto insuperable is always one of the highest delights of the vivisector. And the sensation of the physiologist, when from a gruesome wound, full of blood and mangled tissue, he draws forth some delicate nerve-branch, and calls back to life a function which was already extinguished--this sensation has much in common with that which inspires a sculptor, when he shapes forth fair living forms from a shapeless mass of marble.”--_Methodik_, 1876, p. 15. “The description given by Cyon of the method of operation (_Methodik_, p. 510) is as follows: ‘The rabbit is firmly fastened to the ordinary vivisecting table by means of Czermak’s holder. Then the rabbit’s head is held by the left hand, so that the thumb of that hand rests on the condyle of the lower jaw. This is used as a _point d’appui_ for the insertion of the knife.… To reach the hollow of the temple the instrument must be guided forward and upward, thus avoiding the hard portion of the temporal bone and leading the knife directly into the cranial cavity.… The trigeminus then comes under the knife. Now holding the head of the animal very firmly, the blade of the knife is directed backwards and downwards, and pressed hard in this direction against the base of the skull. The nerve is then generally cut behind the Gasserian ganglion, which is announced by a violent cry of agony (_einen heftigen Schmerzensschrei_) of the animal.’” “When I published my treatise on physiological methods and the art of vivisection four years ago, several of my colleagues of the English Universities entreated me not to announce my work in any of the English newspapers, as they feared that public opinion might be still more aroused.”--Letter to the _Gaulois_, December, 1881.