nal contributions to the literature of the subject, during the
past third of a century, nearly everything has been more or less
polemical, called forth by either exaggeration of utility, inaccuracy
of assertion, or misstatement of fact. Now it has been protest
against the brilliant correspondent of a New York newspaper, who
telegraphed from London an account of a visit to a well-known
physiological laboratory, where he found animals all "fat, cheerful,
and jolly," yet "quite unaffected by the removal of a spinal cord"--as
sensible a statement as if he had referred to their jolly condition
"after removal of their heads." Now it has been the manifesto of
professors in a medical school declaring that in the institution to
which they belonged no painful experiments had been performed--an
assertion abundantly contradicted by their own publications. Now it
is a Surgeon-General of the Army, defending one of the most cruel of
vivisections in which he was not in any way concerned, by an
exposition of ignorance regarding the elements of physiology; and,
again, it has been a President of a medical association, making a
speech, wherein hardly a sentence was not stamped with inaccuracy and
ignorance. To some natures controversy is exhilarating; to myself it
is beyond expression distasteful. Yet, when confronted by false
affirmations, what is one's duty? To say nothing? To permit the
untruth to march triumphantly on its way? Or, in the interest of
Science herself, should not one attempt the exposure of inaccuracy,
and the demonstration of the truth?

Approaching the end of a long pilgrimage, it has seemed to me worth
while to make a final survey of the great question of our time. How
was the cruelty of vivisection once regarded by the leading members of
the medical profession? Shall we say to-day that the utility of
torment, in the vivisection of animals, constitutes perfect
justification and defence? How far did Civilization once go in the
approval of torture because of its imagined deterrent effects?

What has been accomplished by the agitation concerning vivisection
which has persisted for the last forty years? Has the battlefield been
well selected? Have demands of reformers been wisely formulated? Is
public opinion to-day inclined to be any more favourable to the legal
abolition of all scientific experimentation upon animals than it was a
third of a century ago?

What has been the result of vivisection in America, unres