One, a barbarous, ignorant, and thoughtless way, is to stick
little flags into a rabbit's heart and let the students see the
flags jump. The other, an elegant, ingenious, well-informed, and
instructive way, is to put a sphygmograph on the student's wrist
and let him see a record of his heart's action traced by a needle
on a slip of smoked paper. But it has become the custom for
lecturers to teach from the rabbit; and the lecturers are not
original enough to get out of their groove. Then there are the
demonstrations which are made by cutting up frogs with scissors.
The most humane man, however repugnant the operation may be to
him at first, cannot do it at lecture after lecture for months
without finally--and that very soon--feeling no more for the frog
than if he were cutting up pieces of paper. Such clumsy and lazy
ways of teaching are based on the cheapness of frogs and rabbits.
If machines were as cheap as frogs, engineers would not only be
taught the anatomy of machines and the functions of their parts:
they would also have machines misused and wrecked before them so
that they might learn as much as possible by using their eyes,
and as little as possible by using their brains and imaginations.
Thus we have, as part of the routine of teaching, a routine of
vivisection which soon produces complete indifference to it on
the part even of those who are naturally humane. If they pass on
from the routine of lecture preparation, not into general
practice, but into research work, they carry this acquired
indifference with them into the laboratory, where any atrocity is
possible, because all atrocities satisfy curiosity. The routine
man is in the majority in his profession always: consequently the
moment his practice is tracked down to its source in human
passion there is a great and quite sincere poohpoohing from
himself, from the mass of the profession, and from the mass of