PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT AND PHYSIO- LOGICAL SPECULATION.
[TO THE EDITOR OF THE " SPECTATOR."]
Sta,—The question has been raised in your columns as to whether physical injuries are ever transmitted from parent to offspring. Permit me to say that certain experiments recorded by an eminent physiologist throw an important light on this question. As these were experiments on live animals, the Spectator could not be expected to republish or to make use of them.
It appears to me a matter for regret that the ingenious speculations of the Spectator should be cat short by its inability to make use of knowledge gained by a method of which it dis- approves.
I can hardly be wrong in assuming that you would not wish
to encourage or give value to the work of Vivisectionists. The experimental results to which. I have above referred would fur- nish you with decisive information ; but is it not considered objectionable for one and the same person to run with the hare and to hunt with the hounds P—I am, Sir, /Cm,
E. RAY LANKESTER.
11 Wellington Mansions, North Bank, N. W.
[Did any sane man ever scruple to avail himself of sound knowledge, whether that knowledge ought, or ought not to have been available ? Professor Lankester might just as well say that because some of Napoleon's campaigns were gigantic crimes, strategists who disapproved them ought to be regarded as both "running with the hare and hunting with the hounds," if they made use of them in writing on military strategy. Any such scruple would be idiotic. But none the less, Napoleon would not have been justified for making those campaigns on the ground that he was going to add greatly to the resources of military science, by the huge vivisectional experiments he was about to make.—En. Spectator.]
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