O US THAT WE ARE JUSTIFIED IN DESTROYING ANIMALS FOR MERE
EXPERIMENTAL RESEARCH UNDER ANY CIRCUMSTANCES; but now that we possess
the means of removing sensation during experiments, the man who puts
an animal to torture ought, in our opinion, to be prosecuted."

Referring to the experiment upon a cow mentioned in
Dr. Brown-Se'quard's Journal of Physiology, and already described, the
editor adds:

"We are not disposed, in a question of this kind, in which some of the
highest considerations are concerned, to allow our opinion to be
swayed by the opinions or the proceedings of even the greatest
surgeons and the greatest physiologists. That such authorities
performed vivisection is a fact; but it does not satisfy us that the
proceeding is justifiable. Under any circumstances, this much, we
think, is evident enough: that IF VIVISECTIONS BE PERMISSIBLE, THEY
CAN ONLY BE SO UNDER CERTAIN LIMITED AND DEFINED CONDITIONS. We need
hardly add that these conditions have not yet been laid down.
Altogether, the subject is one well worthy of serious discussion, and
gladly would we see the interests of medical science in the matter
properly reconciled with the dictates of the moral sense."

Nothing could be more clearly stated. One reads almost with a feeling
of amazement the sentences we have italicized in the foregoing
quotation. Here, in the editorial columns of the principal medical
journal in the world, is expressed doubt of the justification of any
destruction of animals whatever, "for mere experimental research."
What magnificent independence of the opinions and experimentation "of
even the greatest surgeons and the greatest physiologists" is here
displayed!

Five months later the British Medical Journal in its editorial columns
again refers to the peculiarly atrocious vivisection which it had once
before denounced; it is evident that the journal intends that such
actions shall not be forgotten. In the issue of October 19, 1861, it
says:

"The brutalities which have been so long inflicted upon horses, etc.,
in the veterinary schools of France under the name of Science are
perfectly horrible. Some idea of what has been daily going on in
those schools during many past years may be obtained from such a
statement as the following, taken from a paper by M. Sanson, in the
Journal of Physiology [edited by Dr. C. E. Brown-Se'quard]. M. Sanson
is speaking incidentally of the condition of animals upon whose blood
he was himse