The Report of the Inspector under the Vivisection ACt for the 
year 1878 has made its appearance. The greatest number of 
licenses in force at any one time during the year was 45 : of 
these 18 remained a dead letter. Under the remaining 27 about 
481 experiments were performed, of which not more than 40 in- 
volved the infliction of serious pain. In Ireland 10 licenses 
have been issued, only 5 of which have been aCted on, and no 
pain has been inflicted even in one of the 24 experiments per- 
formed. These statistics are surely enough to show the utterly 
farcical character of the anti- vivisection agitation which gave 
birth to the ACt in question. Even if vivisection were a demon, 
strated evil, biologists might have been protected by the maxim 
“ De minimis non curat lex.” 
Writing on the physical conditions of consciousness, Prof. A. 
Herzen says that a psychical aCt considered objectively is a 
molecular movement, sui generis , which an external impression 
conveyed from the afferent nerves to a reflex sensation induces 
in the central nervous elements ; it is not yet psychic until the 
vibrations have reached a cellule of the grey substance, and it is 
no longer psychical from the moment when the vibrations cease 
or leave the central cell to communicate themselves to the afferent 
nerves to be expended in the form of muscular motion. The 
phenomenon, taken as a whole, presents two phases : in the 
first there is decomposition of the substance of the nervous ele- 
ments, and a release of the latent energy which has been shut 
up ; in the second there is a re-composition of their substance, 
and a storing up of latent energy, destined to serve for future 
expenditure. The author calls the first phase nervopsychic dis- 
integration, and the second nervopsychic redintegration. He 
then proposes the following physical law of consciousness : — 
Consciousness never accompanies the integration or redintegra- 
tion of the nervous elements; it accompanies merely their func- 
tional disintegration. Its intensity is simultaneously in direcft 
proportion to the intensity of the disintegration, and in inverse 
proportion to the ease and the rapidity with which the internal 
work of each nervous element is discharged upon another sensi- 
tive or motor element, whether central or peripheric. 
M. E. Heckel has presented to the Academy of Sciences an 
account of the a< 5 tion of the salts ol strychnin upon the Gas- 
teropod mollusks. Noting the facff that the alkaloids occur more 
frequently and possess a more powerful physiological activity 
the higher we ascend in the scale of vegetable life, he asks 
whether their special task may not be to defend the plant against 
animal enemies, especially as the more important an organ the 
more generally it is possessed of poisonous properties. He 
therefore finds it important to ascertain the action of the best 
known alkaloids upon certain selected terms in the animal series. 
For this purpose he has experimented with strychnin sulphate 
and oxalate upon Helix pomatia and aspersa , and Zonites algirus . 
