Miss Cobbe calls attention, in an eloquent and able letter
to Thursday's Echo, which well deserves careful study, to the tone of Dr. Lyon Playfair's speech at the distribution of the prizes to the medical students of King's College last week, on the subject of Vivi- section. The Times' report of that speech, which was the only one we saw at the time, did not contain the remarks animadverted on by Miss Cobbe, and we think that even as reported in the Daily Telegraph there is only one sentence which deserves her charge of "levity," while there are others to which probably she has not as- signed sufficient importance, —a printed report is no fair gauge of a speaker's drift and manner,—intended to impress seriously on medical students the responsibility for every pang they inflict needlessly on the lower animals. But the assumption at the bottom of Dr. Playfair's speech, namely, that all experi- ments made by competent men for the purpose of scientific investigation, however wide and vague, are morally justifiable,— no matter whether they do not or whether they do open up a clear prospect of securing relief for the maladies of human beings or of the lower animals,—seems to us wholly un- tenable. If that be so, why should the scientific impulse respect the person of man?
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