A discussion took place in the House of Commons on
Monday night on the working of the Vivisection Act, in which Mr. Erichsen, the Inspector under the Act, was attacked for not performing his duties with sufficient sympathy for the animals on which painful experiments are performed, and was pronounced an unfit person for his post, because he had more or less represented on the Commission of 1875 the views of the vivisectionists. We are not ourselves by any means satisfied with the working of the Act, especially in cases of painful operations where cnrari is used as well as anaesthetics, and still less in cases where no ana3sthetics are used at all,— as in the cruel series of experiments made to test the effect of different drugs on the secretion of bile, where there can be no doubt that there was the same utter and gross disproportion between the pain given and the object attained which the Lord Chief Justice and Mr. Justice Hawkins condemned in the case of the dishorning of cattle. At the same time, we ourselves, having taken great pains to inquire into the matter, do not doubt that anaesthetics are far more care- fully administered by many of the licensees than some of the spokesmen of the Society for " the Protection of Animals Liable to Vivisection" appear to believe ; and we do not regard Mr. Erichsen as having simply represented the interests of the scientific vivisectors on the Commission, where his attitude was more moderate and far less pro- nounced in that sense than Professor Huxley's. We should ourselves like to have a scientific representative of the humanitarian view appointed in conjunction with a scientific representative of the professional view, in order that the public might really hear both sides of the case. But as a representative of the kindlier professional men, Mr. Erichsen is a very good choice.
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