presenting his card?" "Do you mean to the advanced lectures or to the
laboratory?" "I mean to an operation IN THE LABORATORY: say a Member
of Parliament or anyone whose position is assured?" "I should be only
too pleased to see any Member of Parliament or any layman who had any
doubt about it if he presented his card, but I SHOULD HAVE TO BE
SATISFIED OF HIS BONA FIDES."

It is a pity that no one thought to ask the physiologist how he
expected a Member of Parliament to prove his "good faith" before he
could enter precincts open to every student of the University. Sir
William Church came to his assistance by suggesting that the professor
would admit anyone "vouched for" by a person whom you know, or whose
position you know; but the curt monosyllabic reply was not indicative
of a welcome, and it was quite different from the conditions which had
just been laid down. The doors of the laboratory are "open," but only
to those in whose silence and discretion the vivisector may trust.

A considerable amount of testimony was devoted to the alleged
painfulness of vivisection. It is the great problem. If the absence
of sensation were a certainty in all operations of the kind, there
would be no reasonable objection to them, no matter to what extent
they might be carried. The physiologists of the present day occupy a
somewhat different attitude from those of half a century ago, or of
yet later periods. Thirty years ago, one of the leading experimenters
in England declared that he had "no regard at all" for the pain
inflicted upon a vivisected animal; that he never used anaesthetics
except when necessary for personal convenience; and that he had "no
time, so to speak, for thinking what the animal will suffer." We find
no such profession of indifference in the testimony of modern
physiologists. What seems to take its place is, in many cases, a
denial of the existence of pain in the experimentation of the present
day. Does anything here turn upon a definition of words? A professor
at King's College, London, giving his testimony, affirmed that "no
student in England has EVER SEEN PAIN in an animal experiment"--a
statement which in one sense everyone can accept, for who can say that
he ever SAW a pain anywhere? Professor Starling, of the University
College in London, declared that during his seventeen years of
experimentation "on no occasion HAVE I EVER SEEN PAIN inflicted in any
experiment on dog, cat, or rabbit in a physiolog