In the midst of practice and lectures, he found time to write or dictate many a brief or lengthy article on obstetric practice or diseases of women, always practical, always exhausting previous authorities. It was in this direction especially that his mind was ever at work. Then when he had come to a conclusion, he withheld no item of it. “Keen to perceive the truth,” says the _Scotsman_,[6] he was equally vigorous in his announcement of it, and cared little to what cherished opinion his statements might run counter. Hence came contests where little quarter was given or received. He was a dangerous antagonist to meet at a joust, and though he could use the keen edge of steel, he oftener despatched his antagonist with a heavy mace of facts or figures, which those who had neither his industry nor his powers of memory could neither refute nor set aside. Hence he made many enemies, for he had run counter to many prejudices, and the old spirit which had opposed his election to the professorial chair cropped out ever and anon, showing that it was smothered, not extinguished. It should ever be remembered that Simpson’s greatness was established before he had introduced chloroform, and depended on his unsurpassed skill in obstetrics and diseases of women, while yet he was a most accomplished general physician. Already, in January 1847, when he was only just beginning to study anæsthetics, he was made one of the Queen’s Physicians for Scotland. We cannot here attempt a history of previous efforts to secure immunity or relief from pain, but it is evident Simpson was in this respect not a man marvellously in advance of his age; the subject was in the air; unceasing efforts at improvement were being made. Before the end of the last century the brilliant chemical discoveries of Priestley had led to his suggestion that drugs might be administered in definite quantities by inhalation through the lungs. Oxygen was the first gas inhaled for medicinal purposes; and in 1795 Dr. Pearson of Birmingham prescribed the inhalation of ether in cases of consumption, being followed ten years later by Dr. Warren of Boston, U.S.A. In 1800 Sir Humphry Davy, when superintending Beddoes’ Pneumatic Institution at Bristol, founded principally for the medicinal inhalation of oxygen, began to study the effects of nitrous oxide, which he employed, after he had become familiar with its intoxicating effects, to relieve the pain of a severe inflammation of his own gums. In publishing his account of its successful inhalation he said, “As nitrous oxide in its extensive operation seems capable of destroying physical pain, it may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations in which no great effusion of blood takes place.”[7] Thus we must credit Sir Humphry Davy with the most original observation and experiment on the subject of anæsthetics: another instance in which the investigator seeking to advance science has made an observation and suggestion bearing