lx LIFE OF DR. ROLLESTON. 



Dr. Rolleston's recommendations, and he also entered into details 

 of the gradual increase of sensibility in the public mind as to 

 the infliction of pain and death, for which those interested 

 should consult the Parliamentary Report itself. Indeed any 

 who for serious purposes desire to examine the conflict of opinion 

 on this subject, will do well to follow it rather in original docu- 

 ments, such as this Blue-Book, than in passages selected for 

 controversial ends. His own conclusion is briefly expressed in 

 a letter where he says, ' A good many scientific men are in the 

 same position as I am. We think restrictions are called for, 

 whilst total abolition is not.' The Vivisection Act of 1876 now 

 in force, and which arose out of the Parliamentary Report, was 

 highly satisfactory to him, as may be judged by the following 

 passage from a letter written at the time : ' I am greatly delighted 

 with Mr. Forster, who has made the Government accept an 

 amendment, which I in my smaller sphere had made the Medical 

 Council accept, whereby frogs are not to be left to the tender 

 mercies of every would-be experimentor. The passing of this 

 Cruelty to Animals Bill is a great step in the history of 

 mankind. There is no country except England and the United 

 States where it could have been passed.' Rolleston's part in this 

 legislation was, however, far greater than is here suggested. 

 Indeed it is obvious to any one who compares the extremely 

 stringent provisions of the Act with the minutes of Dr. Rolleston's 

 evidence, that the new law was in great measure framed on his 

 recommendations, which it follows implicitly. 



Such is a brief inventory of work done by Rolleston in his 

 twenty years of professorial life. He did not keep a regular 

 record of the events and interests which diversified his course of 

 labour, and such mentions mostly come up incidentally in letters. 

 Midway in his Oxford career he escaped 'from daily toil and 

 fret' by a return to the East in 1871. He had all the delight of 

 the classically-bred Englishman in steaming round Cape Malea 

 into the Egean, and testing the outlines of the hollow Spartan 

 shore by the well-remembered epithets of Homer and Theokritos. 

 He found the wood- covered hills of Smyrna as he had left them, 



