We understand that it is alleged on behalf of the
proposal made to the College of Surgeons for founding a labora- tory for physiological and pathological research out of the bequest of the late Sir Erasmus Wilson, that such a labora- tory would not involve any sort of painful vivisection. The plea is hardly candid. In the first place, the memorial to the College of Surgeons expressly mentioned the laboratories in Paris, Berlin, Leipzig, &c., as institutions the work of which we ought to rival ; and all these great laboratories have been and are the scenes of the most terrible experiments on living animals. In the next place, the experiments on rabies and hydrophobia were specially instanced as experiments which London has no laboratory for conducting on any large scale, and these experi- ments have been among the worst,—that is, the most cruel,—of recent experiments. But if the plea is sincere, the evidence of sincerity is easy. Let the memorialists ask that experiments on living animals shall be absolutely excluded by the very charter of the new foundation from the researches which can be made there. Doubtless such a clause, if frankly accepted, would at once extinguish all objection to the proposal. Would it not also extinguish all the zeal of the promoters ?
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