The Medical profession held a great meeting on Tuesday, to
found an association for medical research ; in other words, for investigations of any kind, including those on living animals, and those involving the infliction of pain on them, which, however, they professed themselves desirous to conduct under the restrictions of the present law, though with the avowed intention of considering how far these restrictions are prejudicial to medi- cal research. Sir William Jenner, who presided, intimated most clearly that the Association was founded partly with the view of experimenting on the Act which limits vivisection, and see- ing how far it is or is not detrimental to the cause of science. We wish the Association would remember that there is another question involved, namely, how far, even where the present Act is detrimental to the cause of science, it, nevertheless, prevents moral scandals which might be still more fatal to the moral re- putation of that cause than any restraints whatever on the free vivisection-table well could be. But on this point none of the speakers, not even the President of the Royal Society nor the Master of the Rolls, chose to touch. The Association will do more for their object by taking great pains to prevent any investigation of a torturing kind, than by any other policy whatever. Even the present law has not prevented some very gross abuses,—perhaps because, as the Medical Press and Circular declares, on the authority of a German investi- gator, Herr Karl Vogt, the English authorities "would willingly close their eyes" to vivisections actually going on, than because its provisions are radically inadequate.
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