Later he opened his eyes "and seemed to recognize an onlooker." After this no special supervision was exercised. A hospital porter engaged in the ward noticed the man was breathing in gasps; this was twenty minutes after the patient had been taken from the operating theater and half an hour subsequent to the first administration of the ether. The surgeons were fetched from the operating theater and found by that time that the man was dead. "He was lying with his head thrown back, so that no possible difficulty of breathing could have arisen due to his position. The eyes were open and the lips slightly parted; nor was there any sign of any struggle for breath having taken place." The ether was analyzed and found to fulfill the British Pharmacopoeia tests for purity. The necropsy revealed that the right heart was distended with venous fluid blood. The lungs also were loaded with blood, as were all the viscera. We cannot but feel that the fact shown at the post mortem examination seemed to indicate that the man died from asphyxia and not from heart failure. No doubt patients appear to resume consciousness after an anaesthetic and even mutter semi-intelligible words and recognize familiar faces. They then sink into deep sleep just like the stupefaction of the drunken, and in this condition the tongue falls back and the slightest cause--a little thick mucus or the dropping of the jaw--will completely prevent ventilation of the lungs taking place. Two very similar cases occurred in the practice of a French surgeon, who promptly opened the trachea and forced air into the lungs, with the result that both patients survived. In his cases chloroform had been given. A death under chloroform occurred at the infirmary, Kidderminster. The patient, a boy, aged eight years and nine months, suffered from a congenital hernia upon which it became necessary to operate for its radical cure. The house surgeon, Mr. Oliphant, M.B., C.M. Edin., administered chloroform from lint. In about eight minutes the breathing ceased, the operation not having then been commenced. Upon artificial respiration being adopted the child appeared to rally, but sank almost immediately and died within two minutes. The necropsy showed no organic disease. At the inquest the coroner asked Dr. Oliphant whether an inhaler was not a better means of giving chloroform, and whether that substance was not the most dangerous of the anaesthetics in common use, and received the answer that inhalers were not satisfactory for giving chloroform and that it was a matter of opinion as to which was the most dangerous anaesthetic. We so often hear that the Scotch schools never meet with casualties under anaesthetics because they always use chloroform, and prefer to dispense with any apparatus, that we can readily accept the replies given to the coroner as representing the views current among the majority of even the thoughtful alumni of those great centers of medical training. A glance over the long list