In the Convocation of the University of Oxford on Tuesday,
the vote of 210,000 for Professor Burden Sanderson's physiological laboratory was carried by a very narrow majority of 3, 88 voting for it and 85 against. Professor Burdon Sanderson avowed again the very same principle which he avowed before the Commission of 1875, that while it is wrong to inflict any unnecessary suffering on animals, it is often necessary to inflict suffering for the purposes of physiological investigation, and that any suffering, however keen, which is inflicted for a sufficient purpose, is rightly inflicted. That Professor Sanderson regards every purpose as sufficient which recommends itself as sufficient to a carefully-trained physiologist, there can be no doubt ; and we do not question that Professor Bunion Sanderson would entirely justify Professor Rutherford's eight hours' torture of some scores of dogs, operated on without anmsthetics, for the purpose of discovering the effect of various drugs on the secretion of bile. That a physiologist of these views should be authorised to introduce vivisection into the heart of Oxford, where boys and girls who never see the worst experiments, will certainly hear of them, and know that they are sanctioned by the full authority of the University, seems to us nothing short of a national calamity. We wish we could hope that the vote might yet be rescinded.
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