We made the error last week, in our reference to
the proposed memorial to M. Claude Bernard, of attributing to that celebrated French physiologist an experiment described at some length in the evidence before the recent Royal Commission, which was really conducted not by Claude Bernard, but by M. Paul Bert. The error, however, was not one which was in any way calcu- lated to make M. Claude Bernard responsible for experiments more painful than very many of those which are described in his own works,—amongst others, for instance, in his " Lecons our )es Chaleur Animale," in which he describes the stove used by him for discovering the various temperatures at which different animals are baked to death ; and in explaining the use of which -he gives the circumstances under which twenty-two rabbits and seventeen dogs were thus tortured out of life. The particular experiment, however, to which we referred was- not Claude Bernard's, though there is no reason at all to suppose that bin own were in any degree less painful.
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