x88o.] Vivisection Question. 5°9 
The main points of Prof. Zollner’s work, stripped from 
all irrelevancies, are— First, his approval of restrictions and 
limitations on vivisection on behalf of Government. Such 
regulations, we admit, might work much better in Germany, 
where the authorities respect Science more than in England 
and interfere less clumsily. If licenses to perform painful 
experiments are required in any continental country, they 
will be issued by some competent and qualified official, and 
not by a Secretary of State whose time is engrossed with 
party affairs, and who knows and cares as much about 
biology as does an average bricklayer. Secondly, the pio- 
posal of a substitute for viviseaion, most welcome if prac- 
ticable, but on which the learned author might have been 
more explicit. Thirdly, the claim that physicists aie better 
judges than physiologists of the value and necessity of 
viviseaion,— a doctrine which we shall be prepared to accept 
when it is proved that organisms are mere machines or 
automata, when the chasm between animation and inanima- 
tion has been bridged over, and when irritability is shown 
to be merely a special case of attraaion and repulsion. 
But, if we mistake not, Prof. Zollner is as far removed as 
ourselves from believing in the probability of such a con- 
summation. 
