Miss Frances Power Cobbe was the original organiser and founder in December, 1875, of the National Anti-Vivisection Society which until 1898 bore the Title of the Victoria Street Society for the protection of animals from vivisection. Many years before, in 1863, there lived at Florence a man who trafficked in torture named Schiff; "among the inferior professors of medical knowledge," says Dr. Johnson, "is a race of wretches, whose lives are only varied by varieties of cruelty," and such an one was this miscreant. Miss Cobbe was then resident at Florence and was the correspondent of the _Daily News_, and in that paper she denounced the tortures inflicted on animals by this dreadful man, which so affected her generous heart that for the rest of her life her chief preoccupation became the desire to put an end to such abominations. In 1874 Miss Cobbe drew up a memorial to the Council of the Royal Society for the prevention of cruelty to animals urging upon them "the immediate adoption of such measures as may approve themselves to their judgment as most suitable to promote the end in view, namely, the _restriction of vivisection_." And with indefatigable zeal she collected the signatures to it of a very large number of the most distinguished men in England; among them were such names as those of Thomas Carlyle, Alfred Tennyson, Robert Browning, John Morley, John Bright, Leslie Stephen, W. Lecky, B. Jowett, John Ruskin, Dean Stanley, and Canon Liddon. In view of the fierce advocacy of vivisection to which the present Lord Knutsford has committed himself it is interesting to record that his father Sir Henry Holland's name appears among the signatories of this memorial. The Council of the R.S.P.C.A. in 1875 displayed all the familiar characteristics of the Council of to-day. On receiving this notable memorial they adopted the device of promising to appoint a sub-committee to consider the whole question of vivisection. Unlike the sub-committee appointed in 1907 "to consider the whole question of sport" which never sat, it seems that this sub-committee on vivisection really did sit once, after which no more was heard of it. Mr. Colam the Secretary was sent to call on the leading vivisectors to ask them about their own proceedings; and the Council appear to have imagined that, having asked the persons whose conduct was impugned what they thought about that conduct, their function as representing the Society entrusted with the protection of animals from cruelty was fulfilled. Miss Cobbe, like many of us to-day, really wanted cruelty to animals stopped, and she was not likely to be satisfied with such a farcical evasion, so she set to work and started the Victoria Street Society, and to her above all others therefore belongs the undying fame and glory of first raising aloft the standard of the imperishable cause for which that Society exists and strives.