CURRENT LITERATURE.
The Gentleman's Magazine, for April.— One of the chief interests of this number is an article by the well-known author, " Ouida," on "The Future of Vivisection," in which she urges with great force that the arguments used for the vivisection of useful animals apply with in- finitely more force to the vivisection of useless and dangerous human beings, and are exceedingly likely to be pressed sooner or later to that very logical conclusion :—" If 'knowledge' be the one sacred thing of life, the one absorbing and solely gracious quest, and this knowledge be only obtainable by the prolonged and exquisite torture of the nerve-centres of sensitive organisms, how long will 'knowledge' and its high-priests consent to be defrauded by mere 'sentiment' from that extension and that certainty which can alone, as they already declare, be derived from the subjection to its experiments of human beings ?"
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