DECEMBER 255 



wherefore Parliament has rightly set strict limitations 

 upon practitioners, permitting it only to be exercised 

 by licensed individuals, and insisting upon the use of 

 anaesthetics. The opponents of vivisection seem to 

 exclude from their compassion creatures of their own 

 species, regardless of the immeasurable suffering the 

 incalculable mortality which has been warded off the 

 human race by means of knowledge which could never 

 have been attained without experiment on living 

 animals. The great reduction in the annual rate of 

 mortality arising from tuberculosis and diphtheria de- 

 rives its origin from the discovery of the bacilli of 

 these fell diseases by Koch and Loeffler. More impres- 

 sive still, by reason of the short space of time wherein 

 it has been manifest, is the degree of immunity from 

 typhoid, unprecedented in the history of the nation, 

 enjoyed by those armies in the war which practised 

 protective inoculation. 



Everybody is familiar with the sincerity and vehe- 

 mence with which the mode of research, whereby these 

 results have been obtained, is condemned by anti- 

 vivisectionists ; but who that considers the question 

 dispassionately can weigh the brief sufferings of a few 

 hundred guinea-pigs against the power obtained of 

 averting excruciating disease from millions of human 

 beings ? All succour must have been withheld had 

 the anti-vivisection campaign proved successful and 

 the imaginary 'rights' of the lower animals been 

 allowed to exclude British pathologists from this 

 avenue of research. 



Even from the point of view of the lower animals 



