wonderful advances in this field of
scientific giving. All over the world the need of dealing with the
questions of philanthropy with something beyond the impulses of
emotion is evident, and everywhere help is being given to those heroic
men and women who are devoting themselves to the practical and
essentially scientific tasks. It is a good and inspiring thing to
recall occasionally the heroism, for example, of the men who risked
and sacrificed their lives to discover the facts about yellow fever, a
sacrifice for which untold generations will bless them; and this same
spirit has animated the professions of medicine and surgery.

SCIENTIFIC RESEARCH

How far may this spirit of sacrifice properly extend? A great number
of scientific men every year give up everything to arrive at some
helpful contribution to the sum of human knowledge, and I have
sometimes thought that good people who lightly and freely criticize
their actions scarcely realize just what such criticism means. It is
one thing to stand on the comfortable ground of placid inaction and
put forth words of cynical wisdom, and another to plunge into the work
itself and through strenuous experience earn the right to express
strong conclusions.

For my own part, I have stood so much as a placid onlooker that I have
not had the hardihood even to suggest how people so much more
experienced and wise in those things than I should work out the
details even of those plans with which I have had the honour to be
associated.

There has been a good deal of criticism, no doubt sincere, of
experiments on living dumb animals, and the person who stands for the
defenceless animal has such an overwhelming appeal to the emotions
that it is perhaps useless to allude to the other side of the
controversy. Dr. Simon Flexner, of the Institute for Medical Research,
has had to face exaggerated and even sensational reports, which have
no basis of truth whatever. But consider for a moment what has been
accomplished recently, under the direction of Dr. Flexner in
discovering a remedy for epidemic cerebro-spinal meningitis. It is
true that in discovering this cure the lives of perhaps fifteen
animals were sacrificed, as I learn, most of them monkeys; but for
each one of these animals which lost its life, already scores of human
lives have been saved. Large-hearted men like Dr. Flexner and his
associates do not permit unnecessary pain to defenceless animals.

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