Lady Burdett-Conde, the great-grand-daughter of the Lord Provost who presided
in Edinburgh in 1742, was presented on Thursday week with the freedom of the City of Edinburgh, by the present Lord Provost of that city. She was the first woman, he said, who had received the honorary burgess-ship of the City of Edinburgh, just as she had been the first woman to receive the honorary burgess-ship of the City of London. The Lord Provost, in presenting the honour to Lady Burdett-Coutts, .dwelt with even more emphasis on the Baroness's services to the -cause of humanity to the lower animals, than even -on her munificence to the Churches and the Charities
of the United Kingdom.. (In fact, she has quite re- cently put up a memorial to " Greyfriars Bobby," the dog which put to shame human affection by insisting on sleeping for years on his master's grave.) Lady Burdett-Coutts replied very gracefully, speaking of the hard lives of her " dumb fellow- citizens" with real feeling. Perhaps she may help us to obtain what is sorely needed,—an Act absolutely prohibiting all physio- logical experiments on living creatures except in specified places, and under the strictest guarantees for narcotism ; and regulating minutely the physiological laboratories of our hospitals and anatomical schools, in the interest of these " dumb fellow- citizens," who are at present, we believe, shamefully and un- scrupulously tortured for the purposes, or so-called purposes, of science, in scores of places where the witnesses, like the wit- nesses of Irish agrarian crime, sympathise too much with the offenders to contribute to the detection, or even to prevent the commission, of the offence.
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