Volume 2

Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall.

  • John Tyndall
Date:
1879
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Fragments of science : a series of detached essays, addresses, and reviews / by John Tyndall. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    498/508 (page 486)
    very great. An account of the symptoms preceding death would be by no means pleasant reading. Imagine, then, one of those tender-hearted gentlemen who write about torture and cruelty in the Times,^ entering the laboratory of Pasteur and seeing him sow this malady among his unprotected victims! Some years ago, accompanied by my wife, I visited the laboratory of the Ecole Normale, and we were there shown by Pasteur himself the formidable organism in the investigation of which he was then engaged. It was curious to reflect how a thing so mean could exercise such deadly power over man and beast. Both Pasteur and his assistants had to be very wary in dealing with this organism, for either the adult bacillus, or one of its spores, entering the blood by the slightest scratch of the skin, would have proved fatal to the individual infected by it. In a room adjacent to the laboratory stood a large cage, containing guinea-pigs and rabbits, some sprightly, and munching their food ; some drowsy and languid; some mortally sick, some in the last agony and some in the rigor of death. It was subsequent to these experi- ments that Pasteur operated on larger animals, subject- ing them to the ' tortures ' I have just described. What would a tender-hearted opponent of such experiments have said under these circumstances ? Were it in his jDOwer to do so, would he not have invoked the arm of the law to stay such damning cruelty ? Most assuredly he would. And yet, in doing so, he would have affixed the brand of cruelty upon himself. In lieu of the few animals saved from the operations of the man of science, he would have handed over tens of thousands of the same animals to the fearful ravages of splenic fever. > [Shortly before the preparation of this lecture, several letters discussing the subject of experiments on animals had appeared in the daily papers.—L. G. T.]