Sir Andrew Clark delivered on Wednesday a lecture in favour
of experiments on living animals, in opening the new building of the Bristol Medical School and Faculty. He pro- fessed great sympathy with the opponents of Vivisection, but did not show any very clear insight into their minds and aims. When he began by saying that " vicarious sacrifice was a law of the physical, mental, moral, and spiritual life," he was, of course, quite right ; but in what sense did he use the words? In their theological sense, the words " vicarious sacrifice " mean a sacrifice voluntarily incurred by those who did not deserve to suffer on behalf of those who did deserve, or, at least, did primii facie deserve to suffer. But when you seize an involuntary victim and compel it to suffer on your behalf, that is vicarious sacrifice indeed, but not a vicarious sacrifice that appeals to the higher and more generous instincts of human nature. In the next place, Sir Andrew Clark entirely ignored the very great and practical danger of imbuing the minds of a great healing profession with indifference to the habitual infliction of acute suffering on our unfortunate fellow-creatures of lower orders of mind. He ignored the practical consequences which have actually followed this prac- tice on the Continent of Europe till we have had instances like Mantegazza's horrible experiments on the intensity and dura. tion of the pain which animals can endure, and Dr. Klein's con- fession that he never took into account at all the suffering of the animal on which he was experimenting. Sir Andrew Clark's exposition of the subject was most inadequate. Even among our Scotch experimenters, we have had series of ex- periments involving acute and prolonged suffering on most insufficient excuses.
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