The impression we recorded in commenting on a correspon- dent's
letter the other day, that a large number of English medical men could never have thought it prudent to petition the Italian Parliament in favour of vivisection for Italy, appears to have been correct. Mr. James Montgomery Stuart writes from Rome to Wednesday's MICR to say that the petition presented by Count Torah, and signed by a great number of English medical men, was in favour of absolutely prohibiting vivisec- tion as a part of medical education, and prohibiting it alto- gether except under the restraints enacted by the English Legislature both as to the use of anaesthetics and other con- ditions. English medical men can be noisy and supercilious enough at times, as they showed in their deputation to Mr. Cross, at the time the Vivisection Bill was before Parliament, but they are at least too canny to raise an unpopular cry that can have no possible effect but a .bad one even for their cause. Besides, the veterinary surgeons of England are, for the most part, almost as strongly opposed to vivisection as refined physicians are favourable to it. They do not believe in torture as an instrument of 44 original research."
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