The lay objectors--the professed anti-vaccinators--are with us yet in spite of some very serious lessons which have been taught them. We may pass by the objectors of the class who believe that vaccinated persons cough like cows and bellow like bulls; these objections go into the limbo of old wives' fables or into the category of wilful misrepresentation. Unfortunately there is a large class of persons who can believe the absurdest nonsense about any subject which is particularly distasteful to them.[6] Another class of objection is the sentimental repugnance to the idea of being given one of the diseases of "the lower animals." Now the fact is that already we share a great many diseases with the lower animals, a few of them being tuberculosis, anthrax, rabies, tetanus, cancer, pleuro-pneumonia, certain insect-borne diseases, some parasitic worm diseases and some skin diseases like favus. As the knowledge of the lowly origin of many of our diseases is more widespread, this sort of objection will die out. [6] Antivaccinators constantly allude to calf-lymph as "filth"; if lymph is filth, then I am able to assure them that each one of them has about three liters of it in his own body. An objection which is worthy of more consideration is that in being vaccinated a child is apt to contract some infectious disease such as tuberculosis or syphilis which are the two most dreaded. Now so long as arm-to-arm vaccination was the routine practice, there was a remote probability that this sort of accident might occur. It appears to be true that a few accidents of this kind have occurred, just as a few arms have become septic or had erysipelas develop in them. But when the few such cases are compared with the millions and millions of uncomplicated vaccinations, their importance becomes very insignificant. Now that arm-to-arm vaccination is no longer practiced, but fresh calf-lymph used for each child, these accidental inoculations are a thing of the past. The ignorance of cause and effect is responsible for a great deal of the most childish objections to vaccination as to much else. One woman lately told me that she could not have her child vaccinated because a child in the same street was made a cripple for life by being vaccinated. Could we have a better example of the "post hoc sed non propter hoc."[7] [7] Now and again, however, we have the sad spectacle of some one really well educated but apparently either ignorant of logic or desirous of wilfully misrepresenting facts. The Hon. Stephen Coleridge has an article in the June (1914) number of the Contemporary Review which is, to say the least of it, highly immoral in ethics and statistics.