Late on Tuesday evening the same University's Convocation rejected, by
a majority of nearly 4 to 1 (59 to 16, including tellers), a resolution of Mr. R. IL Hutton's requesting the Senate not to permit "painful experiments on living animals" in the Brown Hospital for Animals, which is under the manage- ment of that body. The resolution was carefully framed so as to admit experiments performed under chloroform from end to end ; and it was grounded not merely on the unsuitability of per- mitting pain and torture in an institution established especially to relieve and cure animals, and without a word in the trust- deed pointing to such a perversion of its purposes, but also on the unfairness of identifying a neutral institution like the Univer- sity of London, which knows no creed in either religion or philo- sophy, with one of the most vehemently-disputed and earnestly- condemned class of moral (or immoral) actions. But the hour was late and the phyaiologists themselves were the class most deeply interested in the debate, so they had it their own way, and the University of London, on all other matters creedless, may be said to have virtually committed itself to one rather remarkable creed, —namely, that the persons whom the Poet-Laureate brands (even too bitterly) as —
"Those monstrous men who carve the living hound, And stuff him with the fragments of the tomb,"
—are, if inflicting no needless amount of pain, not only guiltless of cruelty, but deserving of honour.
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