jggo.] Vivisection Question. 5°7 
at the rate of 473 per cent, and indecent assaults upon 
children under 14 years of age in the proportion of 825 per 
cent. The author refuses to attribute this moral decline to 
the consequences of the war, but ascribes it to the teachings 
of the schools, the universities, and of the press. 
Another subject which plays here no small part is Spirit- 
ualism. By the prosecution of Slade we are told that 
England “ set the seal on its intellectual decline.” On this 
subject we wish to give no uncertain sound : much as we 
honour Prof. E. Ray Lankester for his achievements in 
biological science, we hold that in the Slade prosecution he 
committed a fearful mistake. To hand over to solicitors 
and counsel, to police magistrates and quarter sessions, a 
question which, if capable of solution at all, can only be 
decided by men of Science, was a piece of renunciation or 
self-abnegation which cannot be too deeply deplored, and 
which is doubly to be regretted in a country where Science 
is so little honoured as in England. However much Spirit- 
ualism may have been complicated by deceptions or delu- 
sions, it is the duty of scientific men to make sure that there 
is in the phenomena produced nothing more than is fairly 
referrible to jugglery or “unconscious cerebration.” Till 
this has been done, to call in the aid of such rough and 
ready tests of truth as courts of justice can supply is nothing 
short of a formal abdication and a confession ot impotence. 
At the same time, had Prof. Zollner been better acquainted 
with our institutions he would scarcely have found, in this 
prosecution, grounds of accusation against either Govern- 
ment or people. He is doubtless not aware that so long as 
a statute— however obsolete— remains unrepealed the au- 
thorities cannot prevent any person from applying it to his 
purposes. In conneftion with this subject it must not be 
forgotten that Prof. Zollner, unlike some of his English 
colleagues, proposes, or at least hints at, a substitute for 
vivisection, — to wit, “ bio-magnetism.” This idea surely 
had better have been developed in full, even if some of the 
personalities here introduced had been omitted. Such per- 
sonalities, indeed, form a most strange— and we do not 
hesitate to say a most deplorable — feature in Prof. Zollner s 
work. Virchow, Helmholtz, Du Bois-Reymond, Vogt, 
Pagenstecher, Bernard —every physiologist of note who has 
either practised or defended vivisection, — is denounced in 
a manner which is very far from carrying conviction to the 
mind of the reader. Let us take a specimen : Professor 
Tyndall is no biologist, and has probably never disseCted any 
animal, living or dead ; but he publicly declared, in 1875, 
