A correspondent of Tuesday's Times, who signs himself " F.
R. S.," describes at length an operation on the brain of a paralytic patient, by which an internal tumour was removed and legitimate hopes have been raised of the cure of the patient. The point of the letter is, however, that without Professor Ferrier's vivisectional experiments on the monkey, it would have been quite impossible to localise exactly the seat of the tumour, or to venture on the operation which removed it. The Times, in a leader on the subject, points triumphantly to this experiment as justifying all the vivisection desired by medical experimentalists. The inference is obviously absurd. We have never denied that vivisection,—cspecially if extended to human beings,—might threw the most brilliant lights on physiological, and' therefore also on therapeutical, science. All we have said, and say still, is this, that cruelty is none the less cruel because it happens to subserve humane ends. If Professor Ferrier's experiments were really not cruel,—if they were performed under genuine anmsthetics, and the monkeys experimented on were not allowed to suffer seriously before being destroyed,—we have nothing to say against them. If not, we can see no more justifica- tion for cruel experiments on the lower animals, performed in the hope of benefiting man, than we can for cruel experiments on human beings performed for the same end. And of this we are quite sure, that it will do infinitely more harm ultimately to the human race, to accustom us to the brutal assumption that we may torture any inferior creature ad libitum for our
own advantage, than it will do good to prolong for a few years here, or a few mouths there, the life of a few victims of mortal disease.
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