The public, no less than the Anti-Vivisection Society, will deeply
regret that they were prevented by a professional call involving a question of life and death, from hearing Professor Lawson Tait's promised address on Thursday on the mis- leading medical and surgical suggestions of vivisectional experiments. The new passion for subjecting all sorts of animals to all sorts of experimental treatment is so absorbing, that nothing short of the highest professional evidence that the method is a bad one, and the consequences of it mischievous, is at all likely to disenchant the pro- fession with this most unlovely and most hardening of the practices born of an overweening curiosity. Bishop Barry may insist with his usual good sense and vigour, as he did on Thursday, that not only is it wrong to do evil that good may come, but that it is impossible to do evil so that good will come, meaning, of course, that the moral evil of such practices will always far more than outweigh any physical good. But the English character is, we fear, so constructed that a pennyworth of evidence that physical mischief as well as moral mischief comes of vivisection, would be of more use than a poundsworth of moral denunciation. And this is just what Professor Lawson Tait could have supplied, and what we trust that he will still find his own fitting opportunity for supplying,
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