Professor Tyndall wrote a most elaborate letter to the Times
of last Saturday, describing Professor Koch's experiments on the inoculation of rabbits and guinea-pigs with the germ of tubercular disease, which he finds to be a minute, rod-shaped parasite, which can be propagated outside the body, under fitting conditions,—of which the chief is a temperature ranging from .86 deg. Fahrenheit to 104 deg.,—and which is as fatal in the bacilli of the eighth generation as in those of the first. Pro- fessor Koch found that all the creatures infected with this bacillus, or any of its descendants, became victims to tubercular disease ; while those similarly infected with the pure serum of a person ill of tubercular disease containing no bacillus, did not in any way suffer from it. Professor Koch, in fact, like most of the great discoverers of the same type, has discovered precisely how to spread disease most efficiently, but not how to cure it. The point, however, of Professor Tyndall's letter is in the rather artificial indignation of its last sentence,— 4' However noisy the fanaticism of the moment, the common- sense of England will not, in the long-run, permit us to enact cruelty in the name of tenderness." Certainly not. So far as we know, there is little disposition to enact cruelty in the name of tenderness, even where the cruelty consists in preventing medical experiments on the inoculation of tubercular disease. But suppose the experiments had consisted in inflicting torture such as no decent human being would ever think of inflicting on another of his own race ? Would it be " noisy fanaticism to protest against that Professor Tyndall and the Times are quite as noisily fanatic in their attempt to justify all sorts of torture, under cover of apologising for mild inoculations which hardly any one condemns.
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