doom.--I am, Sir, with apologies for the length of this letter, yours, etc. FRANCES POWER COBBE * * * * * Certainly, as regards the ethics of vivisection, nothing more eloquent has ever been written than this closing paragraph. In a letter to the London TIMES in December, 1884, Miss Cobbe writes as follows: TO THE EDITOR. SIR,--In your article on this subject on Saturday last you called upon the opponents of vivisection to answer certain questions. As I have been intrusted for many years with the hon. secretaryship of the leading anti-vivisectionist society, I beg to offer you the following replies to those questions:-- You ask first, Do we "deny that vivisection is capable of yielding knowledge of service to man?" We are not so rash as to deny that any practice, even the most immoral conceivable, might possibly yield knowledge of service to man; and, in particular, we do not deny that the vivisection of human beings by the surgeons of classic times, and again by the great anatomists of Italy in the 15th century, may very possibly have yielded knowledge to man, and be capable, if revived, of yielding still more. We have, however, for a long time back called on the advocates of the vivisection of dogs, monkeys, &c., to furnish evidence of the beneficial results of their work, not as setting at rest the question of its morality, but as an indispensable preliminary to justify them in coming into the court of public opinion as defendants of a practice obviously (as the Royal Commissioners reported) "liable from its very nature to great abuse." We must be excused if we now hold it to be demonstrated that, whether vivisection be or be not "capable of yielding useful knowledge," it certainly yields only a scanty crop of it. Were there anything like an abundant harvest, such a sample as this would not have been produced with so much pomp for public scrutiny. In short, we think with Dr. Leffingwell that, "if pain could be measured by money, there is no mining company in the world which would sanction prospecting in such barren regions." You ask us, Sir, secondly, "Do we affirm that the benefit of mankind is not an adequate or sufficient justification for the infliction of pain on animals?" We have two answers to this question.