responsible for a part of English
mortality, and a greater proportion even than during thirty-five to
forty years before. It is this gross ignorance on the part of those
who would teach us, this willingness in the defence of all phases of
vivisection, to make assertions which are without foundation in fact,
that justly tends to create distrust of every such statement,
unsupported by proof. We are not questioning the value of asepsis,
which is only a learned phrase to express absolute surgical
cleanliness. The time may come when these septic forms of disease
will entirely disappear. That day, however, has not yet arrived. Why
declare that it is already here? Why proclaim that diseases had "GONE"
which still existed, or that an enemy had been utterly exterminated
which still was responsible for hundreds of deaths?

Nor are English medical writers alone guilty of blunders and
exaggerations concerning the effect of experiments on animals. In the
number of Harper's Monthly for April, 1909, to which we have referred,
an American writer blunders quite as badly as his English confre`re.
He tells us that "the friends of experimental research have almost
completely abolished the dangers of maternity, reducing its death-rate
FROM TEN OR MORE MOTHERS OUT OF EVERY HUNDRED, to less than one in
every hundred."

A more ignorant statement was never put forth by an intelligent
writer. Where are statistics to be found going to prove that among
any people, in any land, at a ny time, 10 PER CENT. of all mothers
giving birth to offspring perished from the accidents or diseases
incident to child-birth? No such statistics can be produce, for the
simple reason they do not exist. In the United States we have no
official statistics of mortality covering the entire country or
reported from year to year. England, however, has recorded the
mortality of its people for over half a century. What support does it
afford to the assertion that at any time one in every ten mothers,
bringing children into the world, perished either from accident or
disease? During a period of sixty-two years, from 1851 down to th
epresent time, there was not a single year in which mortality of
Englishwomen from septic diseases connected with child-birth EVER
REACHED EVEN ONE IN A HUNDRED. But this is the figure for all
England. Then take the forty-four counties into which England is
divided, and from the downs of Devon to the slums of Lancashire, one
cannot f