subject of the trial omitted, but otherwise with very little alteration. The libellous statements scattered through its other chapters can still be read by the lovers of sensation, and the authors doubtless hope that their readers will never take the trouble to read also the evidence before the Royal Commission in which all the allegations of cruelty have been shown to be groundless.

The subject of curare, another bugbear of the Anti-vivisection lecturer, is so adequately dealt with by Professor Richet that I will spare the reader any further discussion on that question here. I have taken the liberty of adding, in a footnote on p. 36, a statement in respect to the usages of English physiologists in relation to that drug.

The experiments of the pharmacologist in the investigation of the action of drugs can be and are carried out under anæsthesia in the same way as those of the physiologist. But the experiments of the pathologist, which consist in conveying germs and other disease products to animals, come under a different heading. One does not deny that if the animal takes the disease, suffering is produced. This is fully admitted by Professor Richet, and I think that any common-sense reader will be convinced by the arguments put forward that the practice is fully justifiable. It is difficult, as Professor Richet points out, to gauge the amount of pain an animal such as a rat, guinea-pig, or rabbit (the animals usually employed for the purpose) really feels when given a disease experimentally, and whether this is greater or less than the suffering it will endure when another disease or a violent death carries it off in the usual course of nature. It is, however, undeniable that the suffering of these animals is much less than those of human beings. A man, when he is ill, suffers a certain amount of discomfort and physical bodily pain; but this is a drop in the ocean compared to the mental worry and anxiety he endures—all that, at any rate, is absent from the suffering rabbit. The pathologist sees beyond the pain which he inflicts to the pain which he prevents. The death of a few lower animals may be, and has in the past been the means of preventing pain and disease both to the animals themselves and to human beings also, who may be counted by thousands or even millions.

If there is one piece of evidence more than another which was given before the Royal Commission that deserves rescue from the oblivion of a bluebook, it is that given by Lord Justice Fletcher Moulton. His is one of the keenest legal intellects of modern times, and he at any rate cannot be accused of having any axe of his own to grind. I regret that exigencies of space prevent me from making more than one or two references to it.

He begins by taking the case of a ship infected with plague, and infested also with rats, the carriers of plague. The ship enters port. Would it be preferable to kill the rats, and so prevent them and the disease from entering the port and causing untold disaster there, or staying one's hand because the slaughter of the rats would be a painful proceeding? The captain who gives orders for the destruction of the rats inflicts pain and death on them in order to prevent greater pain and more widespread death elsewhere. The captain who says, "Spare the rats," is guilty of the criminal act of causing the death of many innocent human beings. So it is with the Anti-vivisectionists: they see only the pain inflicted, and do not heed the pain prevented. On this score they are in a sense logical when they call Lord Lister a brute, although he of all men living at the present time has been the means of preventing the greatest amount of suffering. They see only the pain which he deliberately inflicted on a few rats and rabbits; they cannot see, or refuse to see the measureless amount of misery he has prevented.

In another place the Lord Justice points out that the pain inflicted in all the laboratories of the country put together during a year is infinitesimal compared to that which is inflicted every day in the slaughter of animals for food; to that which ignorant farm labourers inflict without anæsthetics, in spaying animals by thousands in order that beef and mutton may be tenderer or have a more pleasant flavour to the consumer; to that inflicted by sportsmen when their victims, imperfectly shot, die a lingering death; to that which women thoughtlessly allow in order that they may have ospreys in their hats and furs upon their backs.

So far as the satisfaction of appetite, the pandering to the so-called sportsman's instincts, or the gratification of vanity are concerned, these things may go on. The average Anti-vivisectionist disregards them, or at least makes no effort to prevent them. The only kind of pain which stirs his feelings, and meets with his opprobrium, and enables him to indulge in his favourite epithets, is the one justifiable bit of pain in the whole world—a pain inflicted with the noblest of all objects, and by the most humane of all men (for so the medical profession admittedly is), the object, namely, of preventing future pain, which otherwise would encompass the world of life.

Professor Richet has wisely not made his book too long. He has been content to select a few typical and striking examples of the benefits which experimentation on animals has conferred upon humanity, instead of attempting even to enumerate them all. He might for instance have dwelt upon the extinction of rinderpest in South Africa: here, at the expense of a few experimental animals, Koch has prevented a scourge which formerly exterminated hundreds of thousands of cattle annually, and might still be exercising this fell influence on to all eternity if the opponents of scientific knowledge had their way. He might have taken the case of snake bite, and the discovery made by his great fellow-countryman Calmette of the means of combating this deadly poison, which has hitherto killed our Indian fellow-subjects by its tens of thousands a year.

On coming to one of the most recent of beneficent discoveries, he might have dwelt upon the case of Mediterranean fever, and the way which it has been practically stamped out at Malta and Gibraltar, because the method of its spread has been discovered and the disease prevented at the expense of a few goats and other animals.

But those who are wilfully deaf to such arguments will not, I fear, be convinced, even if examples are multiplied indefinitely. In spite of the love for animals which our opponents profess, the life of cattle, particularly if they are so far away as South Africa, does not appeal to them. The happiness of the teeming millions of India does not come home to them. Even the comfort of our brave soldiers and sailors in the Mediterranean stations is of little account: they have never visited the hospitals at Malta or Gibraltar, and seen, as they could have seen a year or two ago, the poor fellows dying off like flies from a mysterious disease that nothing could be done for, because the manner in which the fatal germ entered their bodies was unknown. Now, by the simple prohibition of the use of goat's milk, a prohibition due to animal experimentation and to that alone, the disease has been exterminated.

Anti-vivisectionists do not come in contact with disease all day and every day as medical men do; they therefore do not realise how widespread it is, and what terrible forms it may take. Their notions are vague; they talk about suffering without any intimate knowledge of the question. They bestow their sympathies upon the few victims of the vivisector's knife or syringe; they have none left for the larger