1882 ] . Correspondence . 241 
appear to labour concerning my opinions and practice. Had 
your critic cared to enquire on the subject, he would easily have 
learnt that, having been for twelve years a vegetarian, and a 
well-known writer against every phase of cruel sport, as well as 
against feather and fur wearing, — which articles I never buy for 
myself under any pretence, — his strictures on my supposed in- 
consistency fall very wide indeed of their mark. Your critic will 
do well to buy, beg, or borrow my little book entitled “ The 
Perfedt Way in Diet,” wherein he will find arguments and plead- 
ings galore against slaughter-houses, bird-trapping, seal-hunting, 
leather-wearing, and all other mal-praCtices in regard to animals. 
And, for the future, let him acquaint himself with the truth about 
those whom he assails before laying to their charge “ things that 
they know not.” — I am, &c., 
Anna Kingsford, M.D. 
The above communication, which we print as a curiosity, 
cannot be more truthfully and more severely characterised than 
as typically anti-viviseCtionist, at once in its tone and in its line 
of assertion. Mrs. Kingsford, M.D., of whose very existence — 
not to speak of her “ opinions,” her “ practice,” and her writings 
— we were not aware prior to her recent outbreak in “ Light,” is 
not pronounced personally inconsistent, and hence her letter is 
simply an impertinence. If the lady in question makes use of 
beasts of burden, even without the bearing-rein, she is party to 
a custom involving more pain and “ cutting up alive” than does 
physiological research. If she eschews animal food, “ sport,” 
fur and feather wearing, and the use of leather, her fellow- 
agitators and the public whom she is trying to influence do not. 
Hence the movement against experimentation on animals is in- 
consistent, and has logically no locus standi. Yet we do not see 
that Mrs. Kingsford called attention to this truth, or exhorted 
her hearers to quit their glass houses before beginning to throw 
stones. As our critic has not departed by a hair’s breadth from 
that fairness which we have always endeavoured to observe even 
to anti-viviseClionists, we decline on his behalf the advice so 
naively tendered. Our readers may as well be informed that our 
correspondent is a believer in metempsychosis. She is reported 
in “ Light ” to have recently said that “ she was beginning to 
recoiled her former incarnations, but they were not such as she 
would like to make public. One of them filled her with shame 
and horror whenever she thought of it.” Perhaps, if her belief 
is well founded, she will in some higher state of existence look 
back upon her anti-scientific orations with little complacency. 
The Editor of the Journal of Science. 
