moral character; any momentary doubt on this point which we may feel is set at rest at once by quoting the great crucial instance of Germany.  The syllogism, if it deserves the name, is usually stated thus:  Germany has a higher scientific education than England; Germany has a lower average of crime than England; ergo, a scientific education tends to improve moral conduct.  Some old-fashioned logician might perhaps whisper to himself, “Praemissis particularibus nihil probatur,” but such a remark, now that Aldrich is out of date, would only excite a pitying smile.  May we, then, regard the practice of vivisection as a legitimate fruit, or as an abnormal development, of this higher moral character?  Is the anatomist, who can contemplate unmoved the agonies he is inflicting for no higher purpose than to gratify a scientific curiosity, or to illustrate some well-established truth, a being higher or lower, in the scale of humanity, than the ignorant boor whose very soul would sicken at the horrid sight?  For if ever there was an argument in favour of purely scientific education more cogent than another, it is surely this (a few years back it might have been put into the mouth of any advocate of science; now it reads like the merest mockery):  “What can teach the noble quality of mercy, of sensitiveness to all forms of suffering, so powerfully as the knowledge of what suffering really is?  Can the man who has once realised by minute study what the nerves are, what the brain is, and what waves of agony the one can convey to the other, go forth and wantonly inflict pain on any sentient being?” A little while ago we should have confidently replied, “He cannot do it”; in the light of modern revelations we must sorrowfully confess “He can.”  And let it never be said that this is done with serious forethought of the balance of pain and gain; that the operator has pleaded with himself, “Pain is indeed an evil, but so much suffering may fitly be endured to purchase so much knowledge.”  When I hear of one of these ardent searchers after truth giving, not a helpless dumb animal, to whom he says in effect, “You shall suffer that I may know,” but his own person to the probe and to the scalpel, I will believe in him as recognising a principle of justice, and I will honour him as acting up to his principles.  “But the thing cannot be!” cries some amiable reader, fresh from an interview with that most charming of men, a London physician.  “What!  Is it possible that one so gentle in manner, so full of noble sentiments, can be hardhearted?  The very idea is an outrage to common sense!” And thus we are duped every day of our lives.  Is it possible that that bank director, with his broad honest face, can be meditating a fraud?  That the chairman of that meeting of shareholders, whose every tone has the ring of truth in it, can hold in his hand a “cooked” schedule of accounts?  That my wine merchant, so outspoken, so confiding, can be supplying me with an adulterated article?  That the schoolmaster,