At a very lively meeting held at Bristol on Monday,
Dean Elliot in the chair, to hear a lecture from Mr. B. Douglas, the secretary to the "Society for the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection,"—a meeting much interrupted by the taunts of medical students,—Miss Cobbe made an admirable speech on the whole question. She seems to have admitted, on behalf of the Society, that she believed the Act of last Session was being worked by Mr. Cross in a manner very creditable to him, and so as to prevent very much animal suffering for which plenty of excuse might be found under the Act by less scrupulous hands. But as she justly pointed out, we might at any time have at the Home Office a statesman either indifferent on the subject, or a zealot for physiological research, in which case the Act, with its multitudes of exceptions and per- missive provisions, would speedily become a dead-letter. And the worst symptom in the matter is the zeal which great physio- logical teachers seem to be able to inspire in their students, for this right of inquisition, even at the expense of great torture, into the secrets of the animal economy. It was the lads who inter- rupted Miss Cobbe, not scientific physiologists,—and perhaps the worst result of the practice is that it inspires in such lads a certain contempt for humanitarian feelings as namby-pamby, and a respect for the hardness of purpose which can track out new knowledge through all the complicated labyrinth of nerves quivering with artificial pain. This is a social evil which admits only of a social remedy.
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