there is some reasonable ground for supposing that a jelly-fish or a star-fish is capable of feeling pain. I submit that there is no such ground. The mere fact that the animals are alive constitutes no such ground; for the insectivorous plants are also alive, and exhibit even more physiological "sensitiveness" and capability of rapid response to stimulation than is the case with the animals which we are about to consider. And if anyone should go so far as to object to Mr. Darwin's experiments on these plants on account of its not being demonstrable that the tissues did not suffer under his operations, such a person is logically bound to go still further, and to object on similar grounds to the horrible cruelty of skinning potatoes and boiling them alive. Thus, before any rational scruples can arise with regard to the vivisection of a living organism, some reasonable ground must be shown for supposing that the organism, besides being living, is also capable of suffering. But no such reasonable ground can be shown in the case of these low animals. We only know of such capability in any case through the analogy based upon our own experience, and, if we trust to this analogy, we must conclude that the capability in question vanishes long before we come to animals so low in the scale as the jelly-fish or star-fish. For within the limits of our own organism we have direct evidence that nervous mechanisms, much more highly elaborated than any of those which we are about to consider, are incapable of suffering. Thus, for instance, when the nervous continuity of the spinal cord is interrupted, so that a stimulus applied to the lower extremities is unable to pass upwards to the brain, the feet will be actively drawn away from a source of irritation without the man being conscious of any pain; the lower nervous centres in the spinal cord respond to the stimulation, but they do so without _feeling_ the stimulus. In order to feel there must be consciousness, and, so far as our evidence goes, it appears that consciousness only arises when a nerve-centre attains to some such degree of complexity and elaboration as are to be met with in the brain. Whether or not there is a dawning consciousness in any nerve-centres considerably lower in the scale of nervous evolution, is a question which we cannot answer; but we may be quite certain that, if such is the case, the consciousness which is present must be of a commensurately dim and unsuffering kind. Consequently, even on this positive aspect of the question, we may be quite sure that by the time we come to the jelly-fish--where the object of the experiments in the first instance was to obtain evidence of the very existence of nerve-tissue--all question of pain must have vanished. Whatever opinions, therefore, we may severally entertain on the vexed question of vivisection as a whole, and with whatever feelings we may regard the "blind Fury" who, in the person of the modern