was not to be found, but had to be ferreted out from Jamestown, three and a half miles away; so altogether Antommarchi’s attendance could not be called a success. Napoleon in his wrath was “terrible as an army with banners.” Even at St. Helena, where the resources of the whole world had been expended in the effort to cage him helpless, it must have been no joke to stand up before those awful eyes, that scorching tongue; and it is no wonder that Antommarchi preferred to spend the last few weeks idling about Jamestown rather than forcing unwelcome attention upon his terrible patient. Worst of all, Antommarchi at first persuaded himself that Napoleon’s last illness was not serious. When Napoleon cried in his agony, “O, mon pylore!” and complained of a pain that shot through him like a knife, Antommarchi merely laughed and turned to his antimony with catastrophic results. It shakes our faith in Antommarchi’s professional skill to read that until the very last moment he would not believe that there was much the matter. The veriest blockhead--one would imagine--must have seen that the Emperor was seriously ill. Many a case of cancer of the stomach has been mistaken for simple dyspepsia in its early stages, but there comes a time when the true nature of the disease forces itself upon even the most casual observer. The rapid wasting, the cachexia, the vomiting, the pain, all impress themselves upon both patient and friends, and it is difficult to avoid the conclusion that Antommarchi must have been both careless and negligent. When the inevitable happened, and Napoleon died, it was Antommarchi who performed the autopsy, and found a condition which it is charitable to suppose may have masked the last symptoms and may have explained, if it did not excuse, the young anatomist’s mistaken confidence. We conclude our brief sketch of the unhappy Antommarchi by saying that when he returned to Europe he published the least accurate and most disingenuous of all accounts of Napoleon’s last days. His object seems to have been rather to conceal his own shortcomings than to tell the truth. This book sets the seal on his character, and casts doubt on all else that comes from his pen. He may have been, as the _Lancet_ says, a “trained and competent pathologist”; he was certainly a most unfortunate young man.