The failure of the recent prosecution against Professor Ferrier, for
the alleged breach of the Vivisection Act, is intelli- gible enough, now that it appears that it was Professor Yeo who performed the brain mutilations attributed by both the British Medical Journal and by the Lancet to Professor Ferrier, and that he received a licence for performing them, and for keeping the miserable monkeys alive after they were performed, —which, by the way, he certainly never ought to have received. But it is still quite inexplicable how it happened that.all the medical journals agreed to attribute to one physiologist the credit or discredit of another physiologist's doings, unless it were with the deliberate intention to put the Anti-Vivisectionists on the wrong scent. The very reporter whose account of the matter attributed the experiments to Professor Ferrier, denied in Court the accuracy of his own report, at least in the form in which it was published; but the odd thing is that this particular mistake was made throughout,—that the name of Ferrier was always substituted for Yeo. Of course, we accept Dr. Michael Foster's statement implicitly, but how is it that the facts as stated by Dr. Michael Foster were so mis- understood by the medical journals of the day, that to the man without the liceucc was attributed all that the man with the licence did ? The Times insists on the gratitude we all owe to Professor Ferrier. But if we owe him so much gratitude for mutilating monkeys' brains, and then stimulating them, why is Professor Yeo to be robbed of his claim to similar gratitude, by the unkind silence of the medical journals as to services of this sort which he had been render- ing, but for which Professor Ferrier got the glory P Ie the Vivisection Act going to induce the physiologists to indulge in mystifications as to the real authors of operations requiring a licence, in order that the legitimate restraints enforced by that Act may be the better evaded P
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