Presidential address at the opening of the third session, Nov. 2, 1876 / by Mr. Serjeant Cox.

  • Edward William Cox
Date:
1876
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Presidential address at the opening of the third session, Nov. 2, 1876 / by Mr. Serjeant Cox. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.

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    the Royal Institution. I would not requii-e even to go near him or to hold his hands or examine his table. I would sit in the gallery far from him and a shower of invisible spray from the syringe with which I water my plants would make him look as foolish as he would feel. Let me impose my conditions upon his experiments and I will undertake to annihilate them. As it is, the world has faith in him and his reputation would relieve him from suspiciou of trickery and fraud. But if he were a stranger and for the first time exhibiting his marvellous experiments and asserting, contrary to common experience, that light, heat, elec- tricity and magnetism are identical, and that he would prove them to be so by experiments performed under his own conditions, those experiments failing under my condi- tions, he would have been called a rogue and a vagabond, and prosecuted as an impudent impostor by rival Scientists whose theories his experiments would, if successful, have destroyed. But this subjection of the experimentalist to conditions imposed by his subjects actually prevails with one branch of Science — Physiology. Mr. Lankester is a physologist. He has advocated vivisection as vehemently as he opposes Psychology. He is as eager to prove that animals do not feel pain as that Man has no Soul. When he wants to dissect a living dog to view the beating heart and the quivering nerve, he must first paralyse the limited intelligence of the creature. The physician who desires to learn the functions of the human mechanism cannot do so when lie pleases and how he pleases, or with any human structure he pleases— he must look for cases of abnormal action—and even then he must observe under conditions imposed by the patient and not under his own. But what shall be said of those Scientists who deliberately pronounce a judgment upon that of which they have seen nothing and know nothing ? What would they say if we were to do the like with them ? If a Psychologist were to question the experiments of an electrician, or the dis- [158]
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