A very large deputation waited upon Sir Michael Hicks- Beach
yesterday week to procure his licence for the incorpora- tion of a Limited Liability Company as an Institute of Preventive Medicine, with the omission of the word "Limited," by way of showing that the Institute was not to be established for purposes of profit, but for purposes of disinterested in- vestigation only. In point of fact, what was desired was the foundation of a Pasteur Institute in London, and the ground on which Sir Michael Hicks-Beach refused to give the licence required was, that the Institute would be founded for the pur- poses of a kind of research which would involve experiments on living animals on a considerable scale, some of them probably very painful, and that for such purposes it would be necessary to obtain licences from the Home Secretary to perform these painful experiments. This, he thought, would be forcing the hand of the Home Secretary, who would find it difficult to resist the granting of such licences to an Incorporated Society which had received the licence of the Board of Trade, while yet, under the Act of 1876, he would be obliged to judge for him-, self whether the experiments to be performed on living animals were or were not justifiable. Sir Joseph Lister, in urging the grant of a licence upon Sir Michael Hicks-Beach, declared that 12,000 lives had been saved within four years by the Pasteur Institute from the horrible fate of hydrophobia; while of 403 British subjects inoculated by M. Pasteur, only 7 had died. But of these 403, how many would have died if there had been no- inoculation ? It seems to us that the computation of the num- ber of lives saved by M. Pasteur is the wildest guesswork. Of all patients bitten by dogs supposed to be mad, an exceedingly small proportion ever suffer from hydrophobia, and we doubt extremely whether 7 out of 403 is at all below the probable average. On the other hand, the passion for wholesale ex- perimentation of this kind has increased, is increasing, and ought to be diminished. Sir John Lubbock's jocular speech assumed that bacteria are living animals. We had alway& understood that they are vegetable rather than animal in their organisation.
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