A memorial for the absolute abolition of Vivisection has been
presented to Mr. Gladstone, with a great many most influential signatures attached; nor are we surprised that the permission very improperly given under the recent Act to Dr. Rutherford, of Edinburgh, and others, to perform most cruel experiments without the use of anaesthetics, for most inadequate, not to say contemptible results, has produced this new accession of strength to the agitation against Vivisection. For our own parts, were the experiments on the inoculation of animal diseases excepted, —experiments which, we venture to say, have sometimes proved of the greatest value to animals themselves, no less than to men,—we should, on the whole, be content to go with the abolitionists, not because we think all experiments, especially when conducted under strict anaesthetics, wrong, but because when they are permitted at all, it is so extremely difficult to enforce properly and fully humane conditions. Mr. A. Leffingwell has sufficiently shown in the able paper in the July number of Scribner's Magazine how extremely few remedies of value have resulted from this awfully costly expenditure of anguish. "If pain could be esti- mated in money," he justly says, " no corporation would be satis- fied with such a waste of capital." Take, as the single illustration of this most weighty sentence, Mr. Leffingwell's statement that what the late Dr. Sharpey called " Majendie's infamous ex- periment" on the stomach of the dog, has been repeated 200 times by European experimenters, without establishing to the satisfaction of scientific physiologists the theory for which that act of wickedness was first committed. No wonder the Society for the Protection of Animals from Vivisection goes to extremes. Inoculation experiments, expected to protect against disease, ought, we are satisfied, to be protected ; but all others might well be forbidden, as not at all worth the physical pain and moral evil they tend to produce.
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