"Dr. Pye-Smith said: 'Many of the experiments inflicted no pain or injury whatever, and the great majority of the rest were rendered painless by the use of those beneficial agents which abolished pain and had themselves been discovered by experiments upon living animals.' As to the use of anaesthetics in annulling the agonies of mutilated animals, the audience ought to have asked Dr. Pye-Smith to explain whether he intended to refer to chloroform, or the narcotic morphia, or, lastly, to the drug _curare_. If he referred to chloroform, Dr. Hoggan tells from his own experience (_Anaesthetics_, p. 1), that 'nothing can be more uncertain than its influence on the lower animals; many of them die before they become insensible. Complete and conscientious anaesthesia is seldom even attempted, the animal getting at most a slight whiff of chloroform _by way of satisfying the conscience of the operator_, or enabling him to make statements of a humane character.' Even if it were conscientiously administered at the beginning of an experiment, how little would chloroform diminish the misery of Rutherford's dogs or Brunton's ninety cats, whose long-drawn agonies extended over many days? How little could it affect in any way the cases of starving, poisoning, baking, stewing to death, or burning,--like the twenty-five dogs over which Professor Wertheim poured turpentine and then set them on fire, leaving them afterwards slowly to perish? If Dr. Pye-Smith was thinking of morphia, the reader may refer to Claude Bernard's _Lecons de Physiologie Operatoire_, where he will find that great physiologists recommends its use; but at the same time mentions (as of no particular consequence) that the animal subjected to its influence still 'suffers pain.' I can hardly suppose, lastly, that Dr. Pye-Smith was secretly thinking of _curare_, and that he is one of those whom Tennyson says would "Mangle the living dog which loved him and fawned at his knee, Drenched with the hellish oorali." It is bad enough to "mangle" a loving and intelligent creature without adding to its agonies the paralysis of the powers of motion, and the increased sensibility to pain occasioned by this horrible drug, which nevertheless Bernard, in the work above quoted, says is in such common use among physiologists, that when an experiment is not otherwise described, it may always be "taken for granted it has been performed on a curarized dog."