heavily toward the
laboratory. It included no opponent to all vivisection. On the other
hand, three of the Commissioners at one time or another had held a
licence to vivisect, and one of them seems to have held this
permission for some fourteen years. The Commission also included
among its members the permanent Under-Secretary to the Government--an
official whose acts had again and again been arraigned, and were soon
to be challenged once more. The unusual spectacle was therefore to be
presented of men sitting in judgment upon themselves. One of the
Commissioners--Dr. George Wilson, well known for his work regarding
the public health--had at various times questioned the conclusions of
certain experimenters, but he was not opposed to all research upon
animal life. From a Commission so constituted, we might have expected
as the final result of their labours a report favourable to the
interests of the laboratory, to marked modifications of the existing
law by a lessened stringency of inspection, to relaxation of
restrictions, and to an endorsement of every claim of utility which
the experimenters should put forth.

Such an outcome of the deliberations of the Royal Commission must have
seemed to American vivisectors almost a certainty. During the past
twenty years, repeated attempts have been made in New York, in
Massachusetts, in Pennsylvania, and in the city of Washington, to
obtain some legislation regulating the practice of animal
experimentation to the extent which obtains in England. At "hearings"
before various legislative and Senate Committees, all such attempts
have been vigorously combated by representatives and defenders of the
physiological laboratories, and their strongest argument has always
been the exceedingly detrimental effect of the English Act of 1876
both upon medical education and upon the progress of medical science.
Professor Bowditch once said:

"The amount of mischief which may be produced by the English law
depends very much on the good judgment of the Home Secretary.... In
general, it may be said that the system of licensing and Government
inspection is UNDER THE MOST FAVOURABLE CONDITIONS a source of serious
annoyance to investigation."

We shall have reason hereafter to see the inaccuracy of this
statement, so far as may be evinced by the opinions of English
physiologists and teachers.

Upon the secrecy now maintained in English laboratories, a vivid light
is thrown by the evidenc