26 MARCH 1887, Page 3

We are not without hope that the President of the

Royal College of Surgeons is supported by a considerable number of his colleagues in disapproving the grand laboratory scheme, for the expenditure of the bequest of Sir Erasmus Wilson on vivisection. At leant, his answer to the strong deputation of Wednesday, which waited upon him to protest against a grand laboratory of the Paris and Leipzig order, intimated that though some rooms would be set apart for laboratory work, there was no probability at all that the request of the physiologists' "round-robin" would be complied with. That is well, as far as it goes. But it does not go far enough. We wish our great surgeons would remember that in the representatives of such a science and art as theirs, the moral temper is at least as im- portant as the intellectual vision, and that any sharpening of the latter at the expense of the former is far more likely to de- grade the healing art than any limitation, however galling to the curiosity of science, on the methods of research.