Charles Darwin took a prominent part twenty-five years ago in urging the Government of the day not to make a law which would prevent physiologists and medical men from obtaining knowledge as to animal life and disease by experiment. The great naturalist was a great lover of animals and a most gentle and tender-hearted man. He wrote to me in 1870: “Experiment must, of course, be allowed for the progress of physiology and medicine, but not for damnable and detestable curiosity. I will write no more about it, or I shall not sleep to-night.” Mr. Darwin was alluding to horrible so-called “experiments” which in former days--especially in the latter part of the eighteenth century--were made by utterly irresponsible and ignorant amateurs, witnessed by fashionable ladies, and reported in the newspapers and letters of the day. It is these reckless and useless “experiments” which rightly excited horror and opposition a century ago, and were described by the name “vivisection.” We have to thank these blundering philosophers of the salons of a past age for the mistaken feeling with which some people regard the really valuable and careful investigations which are made by medical men at the present day, with the use of every precaution to prevent pain to the animals used. The testing of drugs, the inoculation of parasitic disease, and the trial of different modes of removing or controlling the disease so inoculated, carried on by highly trained and learned men, who thoroughly know what they are about, and who communicate with one another from all parts of the world as to the progress they are making in curing or even abolishing diseases, such as diphtheria, cholera, sleeping sickness, and phthisis are very different from the impudent unscientific “experiments” of the days of Horace Walpole. The inquiries carried on in the modern laboratories of our great universities should not for a moment be confused with the horrors performed to glorify and show the superior cold-bloodedness of drawing-room pretenders to science, in those strange times.