A considerable amount of testimony was devoted to the alleged painfulness of vivisection. It is the great problem. If the absence of sensation were a certainty in all operations of the kind, there would be no reasonable objection to them, no matter to what extent they might be carried. The physiologists of the present day occupy a somewhat different attitude from those of half a century ago, or of yet later periods. Thirty years ago, one of the leading experimenters in England declared that he had "no regard at all" for the pain inflicted upon a vivisected animal; that he never used anaesthetics except when necessary for personal convenience; and that he had "no time, so to speak, for thinking what the animal will suffer." We find no such profession of indifference in the testimony of modern physiologists. What seems to take its place is, in many cases, a denial of the existence of pain in the experimentation of the present day. Does anything here turn upon a definition of words? A professor at King's College, London, giving his testimony, affirmed that "no student in England has EVER SEEN PAIN in an animal experiment"--a statement which in one sense everyone can accept, for who can say that he ever SAW a pain anywhere? Professor Starling, of the University College in London, declared that during his seventeen years of experimentation "on no occasion HAVE I EVER SEEN PAIN inflicted in any experiment on dog, cat, or rabbit in a physiological laboratory in this country." The experimenter is undoubtedly correct. Neither he nor anyone else in or out of a laboratory has ever "SEEN PAIN." Some of Dr. Starling's testimony on the subject of pain is very curious. Pain, he tells the Commissioners, "would spoil the experiment," and "A PHYSIOLOGICAL EXPERIMENT WHICH IS PAINFUL IS THEREBY A BAD EXPERIMENT." He is asked whether "there are any operations performed under circumstances in which the animal is necessarily and intentionally sensitive to some pain?" Without any apparent hesitation he replied: "NO, NEVER." Surely this is a remarkable assertion. He is not speaking, so far as one can see, of his own laboratory, but of all the laboratories of the world. If, since the discovery of anaesthesia over sixty years ago, there has been painful physiological experimentation in England, in America, or on the Continent of Europe, IT HAS BEEN BAD EXPERIMENTATION. THE PAIN INFLICTED HAS SPOILED THEIR WORK. One may not be inclined to dispute this opinion, and yet be quite certain that some very eminent vivisectors in Europe and America would question its accuracy so far as their own work is concerned.