Lord Granville also made a very interesting speech this week,
in distributing the prizes to the medical faculty of King's College on Tuesday. He told the students that he had been listening on the previous day with great interest to the discussion of the Vivisection Bill in the House of Lords, and said that the Report of the recent Commission, and the assent of the high. medical authorities who had concurred in that Report to the chief provisions of the present Bill, had removed the difficulty which he might have felt in the previous year as to voting for a measure most grateful to his feelings of humanity, but the pro- visions of which he might then have feared likely to prove too fettering to scientific investigation. He remarked also on the large increase in the number of candidates for the post of trying' to cure or alleviate our bodily ailments. Canning's friend, who' was asked to prescribe for the malady of a man who com- plained chiefly of feeling "so very empty before dinner, and 80 very full after it," would not, Lord Granville thought, be so likely now-a-days to be consulted for such a malady as that, for the knowledge of physiology among laymen was on the increase ; still, even after the imaginary maladies were subtracted, the in- crease of population and the increase of complexity in their maladies would be sufficient to occupy the increasing numbers of the healers. We hope so, we are sure. Otherwise, we fear, instead of a great increase in the application of therapeutic know- ledge, we may have a great increase in the number of the painful and generally unremnnerative gropings into the phenomena of animal life.
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