"Our readers are aware that the French Minister of Commerce submitted to the Academy of Medicine documents supplied to him by a London society.... A committee of the Academy examined these questions and issued a report, but they did not answer the simple questions put to it. A discussion on the report has naturally taken place in the Academy itself, and has given rise to some very interesting remarks. M. Dubois ... refused to draw up the report because he differed somewhat in opinion on the subject of vivisections from many of his associates. He therefore reserved the liberty of speaking his mind freely on the subject before the Academy. His conclusions are well worthy serious attention. They seem to us to contain all that can be rightly said in favour of vivisection, and to put the matter on its true and proper footing. The greatest praise is due to M. Dubois for having had the courage to express his opinion so boldly and openly.... "In the first part of his speech, M. Dubois demolished the work of the report, showing that it did not answer the questions of the Government, and left things exactly in their previous state. He then proceeded to give his opinion as to what reforms should be made in the practice of vivisection. The greatest physiologists, he remarked, such as Harvey, Asselli, Haller, were parsimonious and discreet in their use of vivisection. To-day we have before our eyes a very different spectacle. Under pretence of experimentally demonstrating physiology, the professor no longer ascends the rostrum; he places himself before a vivisecting-table, has live animals brought to him, and experiments. The habitual spectators at the School of Medicine, the College of France, and the Faculty of Sciences, know how experiments are made on the living flesh, how muscles are divided and cut, the nerves wrenched or dilacerated, the bones broken or methodically opened with gouge, mallet, saw, and pincers. Among other tortures there is that horrible one of the opening of the vertebral canal or of the spinal column to lay bare membranes and the substance of the marrow; IT IS THE SUBLIME OF HORROR. One needs to have witnessed that sight thoroughly to comprehend the real sense of the word `vivisection.' Whoever has not seen an animal under experiment CANNOT FORM AN IDEA OF THE HABITUAL PRACTICES OF THE VIVISECTORS. M. Dubois drew an eloquent picture of these practices, become usual in the physiological amphitheatres in the midst of blood and of howls of pain, and he showed that under the dominant influence of the vivisectors, physiological instruction has gone out of its natural road. Himself an eminent pathologist, he treated without ceremony the unjustifiable pretensions of those innovators, who, regardless at once of the principles of physiology and those of pathology, try to transport clinical surgery to the table of vivisection.