Note 22 — ZOOPHILY.

The best effort to supply the missing chapter of ethics is the charming and eloquent volume, Rights of an Animal, by E. B. Nicholson. I thankfully recognize the candor wherewith the author has tackled the difficult problems of the case, and the value of his demonstration that the law of England assumes the fundamental principle that cruelty to an animal is an offence per se, and that it is not necessary to show that it injures any human owner or spectator. In this respect, as in all others, our Act (11 and 12 Vict. c. 39) immeasurably transcends the French Loi Grammont, which condemns only cruelty exhibited in public places and painful to the spectators. Mr. Nicholson justifies vivisection only so far as it can be rendered absolutely painless by anæsthetics. To such of us as have seen through that delusion, cadit quaestio.