[_From editorial in "The Spectator," London, July 17, 1880._]
"A memorial for the absolute abolition of vivisection has been
presented to Mr. Gladstone with a great many most influential
signatures attached. For our own part, were the experiments on the
inoculation of animal diseases excepted,--experiments which, we
venture to say, have sometimes proved of the greatest value to animals
themselves,--we should, on the whole, be content to go with the
abolitionists, not because we think all experiments, especially when
conducted under strict anaesthetics, wrong, but because when they are
permitted at all it is so extremely difficult to enforce properly and
fully humane conditions. Dr. A. Leffingwell has sufficiently shown in
the able paper in the July _Scribner's Magazine_, how extremely few
remedies of value have resulted from this awfully costly expenditure
of anguish. 'If pain could be estimated in money' he justly says,
'no corporation would be satisfied with such a waste of capital.'
Take, as the single illustration of this most weighty sentence,
Dr. Leffingwell's statement that what the late Dr. Sharpey called
'Magendie's infamous experiment' on the stomach of the dog, has
been repeated 200 times without establishing to the satisfaction of
scientific physiologists the theory for which that act of wickedness
was first committed. No wonder the society for the Protection of
Animals from Vivisection goes to extremes."