Alas! something more inept still has been said, and I hand over this prodigious and audacious assertion to the judgment of every man of heart and common sense. It refers to bacteriology. The author, after having said that microbes are not the cause of disease, takes refuge behind the opinion of Lawson Tait (quoted by Mona Caird, _The Inquisition of Science_, p. 20). "Such experiments never have succeeded, never can: and they have, as in the cases of Koch, Pasteur, and Lister, not only hindered true progress, but they have covered our profession with ridicule." That is something which may well confound us, is it not? and I believe those great benefactors of humanity, Koch, Pasteur and Lister, may indeed murmur: "Forgive them; for they know not what they say." To sum up: the objections of anti-vivisectionists are irrefutable if we admit, (1) that man has not the right to kill an animal either in self-defence or for nourishment; (2) that the suffering of an animal is as worthy of respect as the suffering of a man; and (3) that the misery of one individual is as sacred as the misery of a thousand individuals. No logical reply can be made to these three assertions, which, according to my reasoning, constitute an offence against the most elementary common sense. But I doubt very much if we shall ever arrive at demonstrating that it is better to allow one hundred children to die from diphtheria rather than draw a little blood from a horse; or that we should practise vivisection on man so as to alleviate the diseases of dogs. Concerning the polemics of anti-vivisectionists as to the uselessness of physiology, and the contradictions of physiologists, they are nothing but a tissue of error and ignorance. APPENDIX A We give herewith a table showing the absolute and relative mortality due to diphtheria in Paris from 1872 to 1905, out of a population of 2,500,000 inhabitants:-- ABSOLUTE. PER 100,000 INHABITANTS.