FUTILE SACRIFICES

The news that at least two members of the Anti-Compulsory Vaccination Society are about to submit voluntarily to small pox infection arouses no thrill of admiration in most readers of the daily prints. It is hard to see just who will profit by the experiment. If the doctors escape the disease after nine days confinement in a penthouse, it will prove that some persons are less susceptible to contagion than others. If they die of the plague, as seems quite likely, it will prove nothing. In neither case, will there be any great advancement of medical science. The contemplated experiment is both foolhardy and uncalled for.

The contributions which have been made to science at the cost of the lives of scientific investigators are too numerous and too well-known to need citation. The names of Trudeau, Bergoine, Becquerel, Muller, Macfayden, and hosts of this who have died in the service of humanity are too deeply engraved in the medical and scientific history of the world to fade with the passage of time. There is an impersonal heroism in such quiet sacrifice that endures while other more briefly startling varieties sink gently into oblivion.

The gain in the world's stock of knowledge in all these cases has been so inestimable as greatly to outweigh the loss of one individual life--and in this lies the explanation of their immortality. Where there is no legacy of knowledge, and no possibility of it, the deliberate death of a scientist becomes little more than pointless suicide--magnificent, but futile and without vision.