1896.] Editor's Table. 33 



sectionists are, unwittingly, doing what they can to sustain ignorance 

 and to prevent the relief of human suffering. They are sacrificing their 

 fellow beings, their relatives and their friends, in preference to a few 

 of the lower animals. Men, women and children may suffer and die; 

 white rabbits, guinea-pigs and dogs may live. Such logic is like that 

 of the Spanish Inquisitors, who tortured human beings under the belief 

 that they served God and the cause of religion in so doing. There is, 

 however, less excuse for the antivivisectionists, since knowledge is more 

 widely distributed now than then, and the great utility of vivisection has 

 been demonstrated over and over again. 



The six national scientific societies to meet during the holidays in 

 Philadelphia will probably express their views on this subject, and it 

 may be confidently expected that these will accord with those of science 

 the world over. 



Intelligent people are best deceived by intelligent frauds. A fraud 

 in order to succeed in the United States must make pretensions to supe- 

 rior knowledge. The alleged or actual graduate of medicine who 

 desires to be a fraud has a pretty good field in this country ; and his 

 successes are ever with us, in spite of the opposition of the many true men 

 of that profession. The scientific fraud has not yet developed very 

 largely, as there is no money to be made by pretense in this direc- 

 tion. In fact this species of the genus is not generally a person of evil 

 intentions, and errs chiefly through an active imagination, and perhaps 

 sometimes through a tendency to megalomania. 



We are moved to these remarks by reading an article in the Dec- 

 ember number of a Chicago Journal called Self Culture. On p. 587 

 we read ; " Examination of the brain of such an idiot before its education 

 has begun, shows but few brain cells, and a few nerve fibres connecting 

 them. And when a postmortem has been made upon the child that 

 was once an idiot but that has been lifted up by long years of patient 

 training to citizenship in the moral and rational sphere in which we live 

 and move, such a postmortem shows that an infinite number of brain- 

 cells have been created de novo; that fibers becoming necessary have 

 appeared, to connect such cells, centers of sensation and emotion and 

 thought." 



Now the author of this paragraph should refer us to the published 

 articles which describe the removal of the brains or parts of brains of 

 idiotic children for sectioning and microscopic investigation, and the 

 subsequent replacement of these organs or parts of them in the crania 

 of the children in order that they may undergo the "long years of 



