And that is what is wrong with all the barren cruelties of
the laboratories. Darwin's followers did not think of this. Their only
idea of investigation was to imitate 'Nature' by perpetrating violent
and senseless cruelties, and watch the effect of them with a paralyzing
fatalism which forbade the smallest effort to use their minds instead of
their knives and eyes, and established an abominable tradition that the
man who hesitates to be as cruel as Circumstantial Selection itself is a
traitor to science. For Weismann's experiment upon the mice was a mere
joke compared to the atrocities committed by other Darwinians in their
attempts to prove that mutilations could not be transmitted. No doubt
the worst of these experiments were not really experiments at all, but
cruelties committed by cruel men who were attracted to the laboratory by
the fact that it was a secret refuge left by law and public superstition
for the amateur of passionate torture. But there is no reason to suspect
Weismann of Sadism. Cutting off the tails of several generations of mice
is not voluptuous enough to tempt a scientific Nero.
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