VIVISECTION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THR "SPECTATOR."] you permit me a few words in reference to the editorial note appended to the letter in your last issue, from " An Opponent of Vivisection ?" With regard to that most able letter itself, I would only draw your attention to a slight, but not unimportant misprint. The Vivisection delusion has been in active existence, not for 200, but for 2,000 years,—probably much longer, for it is a method of research which would naturally suggest itself to a beginner. But for the twenty cen- turies, we have the authority of history. The question, how- ever, with which I am specially anxious to deal, is that of in- oculation, justly described in your note as "by far the strongest part of the case for experiments on living animals." And it is precisely because it is the strongest that I would ask you and all other impartial thinkers to consider the question with some extra care, before throwing the weight of your authority into the physiological scale. Before doing anything to encourage the rapidly-growing mania for inoculation, which is likely to be the scientific "craze" of the next quarter of a cen- tury or so, let us, at least, thoroughly understand the direction in which it is leading us. Some few years ago, a little jeu d'esprit was published by our Society, representing the denizens of the coming age of Science as securing them- selves against all the ills to which flesh is heir by precisely the means here in question. Hydrophobia was provided against by canination, glanders by equination, measles by porcination, and so forth, till all the various viruses of Noah's Ark had been carefully communicated to the human subject, who was thereby to secure immunity from every human disease. What was thus written in jest appears now in a fair way of adoption in earnest. Have its adopters ever given half-an-hour's unbiassed thought to its plain, practical result ? "The blood is the life." What sort of life will it be that shall be sustained by a blood into which has been introduced, in however modified a form, a whole series of pollutions, each one of which, if it have produced any effect at all, can, ex hypothesi, only have produced it by means of some vital change in the blood into which it has been intro- duced P—I am, Sir, &c., C. ADAMS, Secretary S.P.A.V.
[What evidence is there that vaccination, for instance, renders the blood of those who have passed through it in the least less healthy ? The idea that it is so is wholly a priori and against experience.—En. Spectator.]
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