No estimate of the future of vivisection in America can be of value which does not recognize the power of the laboratory at the present day. Half a century ago, the vivisection of animals was rarely practised; to-day, in the older states, there are few institutions of higher learning which do not possess ample facilities for animal experimentation. Millionaires, many times over, have been induced to devote some part of their great wealth to the foundation and support of institutions for exsperimentation upon living things. Farms have been established where animals destined to sacrifice, are born and bred. It may safely be estimated that in America, to-day, there are not less than five hundred times as many experiments every year, as took place half a century ago. One must recognize, too, the change which has taken place in the attitude of a majority of the medical profession towards this reform. During the past thirty years, thousands of young men have entered the profession, who have been carefully educated to regard all criticism of animal experimentation as due to a sentimentalism worthy only of contempt. I greatly doubt whether even one per cent. of the physicians in America, under fifty years of age, have ever heard that half a century ago, the feeling of the medical profession, in the English-speaking world was almost unanimous in disapproval and condemnation of methods and of experiments which now pass without notice, and uncondemned. When men, educated to come into the closest of relations with their fellow-beings, are thus prejudiced and uninformed, should we wonder that their views are so widely accepted? The wonder to me is rather that so large a minority are not to be convinced that everything in a laboratory must be right. Another element of the forces that to-day are marshalled against reform, is the Press. Political journals, which even twenty-five years ago endeavoured to hold an attitude of impartiality, now present editorials almost every week in ridicule of any legal regulation of vivisection, or of any opposition to laboratory freedom. The intimate knowledge of medical matters sometimes exhibited by the writers, would seem to indicate a closer relation between the physiological laboratory of to-day, and the editorial sanctum, than existed forty years ago. There are journals, so closely related, apparently, to laboratory interests, that they do not permit correction of editorial misstatements or mistake to appear in their columns, even when such blunders are pointed out. The old impartial attitude of the Press seems--except here and there--to have completely disappeared. Any forecast of the future must take into account this vast and ever- increasing influence.