ditorial of August 29 are specially significant:

"... As a general rule, neither our [British] students nor teachers
are wont to carry on experiments upon living animals even in a private
way. The utmost that can be said is that perhaps some two or three--
at the most six--scientific men in London are known to be pursuing
certain lines of investigation which require them occasionally during
the year to employ living animals.... Whilst the schools of medicine
in this country are as a rule not liable to the charge of
vivisectional abuses as regards the higher animals, we cannot
altogether acquit them from a rather reckless expenditure of the lives
and feelings of cold-blooded creatures.... The reckless way in which
we have sometimes seen this poor creature [the frog] cut, thrown and
kicked about, has been sometimes sickening.... We cannot help feeling
there is both A BAD MORAL DISCIPLINE FOR THE MAN, as well as an amount
of probable pain to the creature, in such a practice."

How strange such criticism as this appears to-day! Can one imagine a
medical journal in America or England expressing in our time any
sympathy for the suffering of frogs in a physiological laboratory? Can
one fancy on the part of its editor a suggestion of "bad moral
discipline" which the ruthless vivisection of animals of the highest
organization or grade of intelligence might induce? To-day such
criticism is unthinkable. Yet the capacity of animal suffering has
not diminished. The number of victims is vastly larger. What change
has occurred which makes it impossible to conceive on the part of a
medical journal of the present time the expression of such a sentiment
of pity for one of the lower forms of animal life?

The Lancet was not alone in such condemnations. No periodical of that
day, devoted entirely to the problems of medicine, occupied a position
of influence equal to that of the British Medical Journal. One of its
earlier editorial utterances concerning vivisection appeared in its
issue of May 11, 1861, three years before the date given by
Dr. Bowditch as that of "the first serious attack."

"The Emperor of the French has received a deputation from the Royal
Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals. We sincerely trust
that this interview may be the means of putting an end to the
unjustifiable brutalities too often inflicted on the lower animals
under the guise of scientific experimentation. IT HAS NEVER APPEARED
CLEAR T