at least have done with our cant of “humanity,” and abolish our Acts of Parliament, and dissolve our Bands of Mercy, and our three hundred Societies for the Prevention of Cruelty throughout the world. The idea of vivisection (to use the phrase of its two thousand advocates who memorialized Sir Richard Cross) rests on the conception of an animal (a dog, for example) as “a carnivorous creature, valuable for purposes of research,”--a mechanism, in short, of nerves and muscles, bones and arteries, which, as they added, it would be a pity to “withdraw from investigation.” The crass materialism which thus regards such a creature as a dog (and would, doubtless, if its followers spoke out, be found similarly to regard a man) is at the opposite pole of thought and feeling from the recognition of the animal in its higher nature as an object of our tenderness and sympathy. We cannot hold both views at once. If we take the higher one, the lower must become abhorrent in our eyes. There is, there ought to be, no question in the matter of a little more or a little less of torture, or of dispute whether anæsthetics, when they can be employed, usually effect complete and final or only partial and temporary insensibility; or of whether such processes as putting an animal into a stove over a fire till it expires in ten or twenty minutes ought to be called “baking it alive,” or described by some less distressing and homely phraseology. It is the simple idea of dealing with a living, conscious, sensitive, and intelligent creature as if it were dead and senseless matter against which the whole spirit of true humanity revolts. It is the notion of such absolute despotism as shall justify not merely taking life, but converting the entire existence of the animal into a misfortune, which we denounce as a brutal misconception of the relations between the higher and the lower creatures, and an utter anachronism in the present stage of human moral feeling. A hundred years ago, had physiologists frankly avowed that they recognized no claims on the part of the brutes which should stop them from torturing them, they would have been only on the level of their contemporaries. But to-day they are behind the age; ay, sixty years behind the legislature and the poor Irish gentleman who “ruled the houseless wilds of Connemara,” and had the glory of giving his name to Martin’s Act. How their claim for a “free vivisecting table” may be looked back upon a century to come, we may perhaps foretell with no great chance of error. In his last book, published ten years ago, Sir Arthur Helps wrote these memorable words: “It appears to me that the advancement of the world is to be measured by the increase of humanity and the decrease of cruelty.... I am convinced that, if an historian were to sum the gains and losses of the world at the close of each recorded century, there might be much which was retrograde in other aspects of human life and conduct, but nothing could show a backward course in