In the long catalogue of scientific cruelties there is hardly anything quite so painful to think of as that experiment of putting an animal under the bell of an air-pump and exhausting the air from it.

[I never saw the accursed trick performed.

Laus Deo!] There comes a time when the souls of human beings, women, perhaps, more even than men, begin to faint for the atmosphere of the affections they were made to breathe.

Then it is that Society places its transparent bell-glass over the young woman who is to be the subject of one of its fatal experiments.

The element by which only the heart lives is sucked out of her crystalline prison.