alleged tortures of vivisection was hardly possible. Thousands of human beings had yearly to undergo—every man, woman, and child might have to undergo—agonies quite as terrible as any that the most ardent advocate of the rights of animals, the most vivid imagination excited by fear for dearly loved dumb companions, ascribes to the vivisector’s knife. It may well be doubted whether the highest brutes are capable of suffering any pain comparable with that of hardy soldiers or seamen—much less with that of sensitive, nervous men, and delicate women—when the surgeon’s blade cut through living, often inflamed tissues, generally rendered infinitely more sensitive by previous disease or injury, while the brain was fully, intensely conscious; every nerve quivering with even exaggerated sensibility. The brutes, at any rate, are spared the long agony of anticipation, and at least half the tortures of memory. They may fear for a few minutes; our fathers and mothers lay in terror for hours and days, nay, persons of vivid imagination must have suffered acutely through half a lifetime, in the expectation that, soon or late, their only choice might lie between excruciating temporary torture and a death of lingering hopeless anguish. No gift of God, perhaps, has been so precious, no effort of human intellect has done more to lessen human suffering and fear, to take from life much of its darkest evil and horror, than anæsthesia as developed during the last fifty years. True that in the case of severe operations it is as yet beyond the power of medicine to give complete relief. If spared the torture of the operation, the patient has yet to endure the cruel smart that the knife leaves behind. But the relief of previous terror, of the awful, unspeakable, and, to those who never felt it, almost inconceivable agony endured while the flesh was carved, and the bone sawn, have disappeared from the sick room and the hospital.