Excerpt from Speech Delivered in the House of Commons on the Second Reading of Mr. Reid's Bill for the Total Suppression of Scientific Experiments Upon Animals, April 4, 1883 Take an instance in point. A foreign experimentalist Thiersch - by sacrificing 14 mice, found that the germs in choleraic discharges, imbibed through water, reproduced cholera with certainty. The same fact, it is true, was suspected in the cholera epidemics of 1848 - 9, and of 1853 - 4, when the Southwark and Vauxhall, as well as the Lambeth Water Companies, supplied water tainted with choleraic evacuations to about half a million of their consumers. In the case of Lambeth, during the first of the epidemics, 125 out of every of the population died; but in the second epidemic, only 37 for, in the interval, the quality of the water was improved. But the Southwark and Vauxhall Company made no such improvement, and the cholera deaths. Were 118 to in the first, and 130 in the second epidemic. These experiments with water, charged with faecal matter, on human beings were valuable to medical science, but not in the least more valuable than Thiersch's recent experiments on 56 mice, of which 44 took the disease, and 14 died. Had these been made anterior to the cholera epidemics, the great mortality might have been averted. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.