⁂ A further newspaper correspondence concerning “The Nine Circles,” a work from which some of the foregoing notes on vivisection are copied, has gone on while “Woman Free” is passing through the press; the vivisectors saying that certain of the incidents transcribed in “The Nine Circles” are without the announcement that in some cases an anæsthetic had been administered prior to the act of living anatomy, otherwise admittedly true in every detail. The vivisectors lay what stress they can on the omissions; indeed, their principal advocate has made use of a grossness of imputation and a coarseness of invective that augurs ill for any gentleness of treatment or purpose being existent in the organism of such an operator. Yet, in truth, it is not a matter of surpassing import whether the assertion of the operation (alone) being conducted under an anæsthetic be indubitable, since the after-consequences of pain or incommodity had to be endured by the victim without anæsthetics. What initial chloroforming could ward off the constant after-suffering attendant on the incubation of the disease for the creation of which the “operation” had been performed, a period acknowledgedly often lasting for weeks, and terminated only by death’s mercy? Or what medicament could anæsthetise the impotent yearning—to feed her starving puppy—of a poor mother dog whose mammary glands had been excised, even if the “operation” had been carried out “under chloroform”? Mr. Edward Berdoe, M.R.C.S., reproduces and reprobates the incident with horror in the _Times_ of Oct. 27, 1892:— “Professor Goltz amputated the breast of the mother of a puppy nursing her young ... who ‘unceasingly licked the living puppy with the same tenderness as an uninjured dog might do.’” Most gladly may we turn to the words and ways of worthier seekers after truth. Professor Lawson Tait is reported by the _Standard_, 28th Oct., 1892, as saying at a meeting the previous day:— “Vivisection was a survival from mediæval times. It could not be justified by any results that it had produced. In days when they could tell the composition of the atmosphere of Orion by means of the spectroscope, it was a disgrace that men should resort to vivisection, instead of perfecting other and more humane means of research.” There speaks true science. And, on a later occasion, Mr. Lawson Tait quotes the celebrated anatomist, Sir Charles Bell (who had been falsely claimed as an advocate of vivisection), as saying, “on page 217 of the second volume of his great work on the Nervous System, published in 1839”:—