Professor Syme met the innovation with vehement opposition; possibly he resented this intrusion of the gynaecologist into the regions of general surgery. He took into his class-room one pamphlet on the subject by Simpson, which had especially aroused his wrath; he stormed at the author before his students for "his vulgar insolence," and then, in a dramatic scene, expressed the violence of his contempt by savagely tearing the pamphlet into pieces and casting it away. In a subsequent controversy between these two old opponents, who had been temporarily united by Simpson's conduct in consulting Syme professionally, by their joint action against homoeopathy, and by Simpson's defence of Syme when publicly attacked by an English surgeon, the feud was renewed. Simpson persisted for years in collecting reports of operations in which acupressure was employed, and published them from time to time in the _British Medical Journal_ and elsewhere. In 1864 his work on the subject took the form of a volume containing 580 quarto pages. His friends endeavoured to rank acupressure with chloroform as one of the blessings to humanity made manifest by him. He himself recognised that he had failed to gain for acupressure a place in practice such as he had gained for chloroform, but he looked forward to a time, perhaps a quarter of a century distant, when his method would be beginning to be thought about. In this he was mistaken for, on the contrary, acupressure was beginning to be forgotten long before twenty-five years had elapsed. Another worker on more strictly scientific lines had by that time made healing by first intention, without complications, the rule instead of the exception, and conferred a benefit on humanity as great if not greater than that of anaesthesia. In 1867, while Simpson was still alive, Mr. (now Lord) Lister (then a hospital surgeon in Glasgow, and subsequently Syme's successor in Edinburgh) enunciated the new principle of "antiseptic surgery," which recognised the living infective micro-organisms of the air as the cause of the trouble in wounds. He directed that as these invisible organisms (known only by means of the microscope) were present everywhere in the air, found their way into all sorts of wounds, and set up the decomposition which led to disastrous results, they were to be destroyed or excluded from wounds; and he suggested effective means of accomplishing this end. He further abolished the long ligatures which irritated by their presence, and by the organisms they conveyed into the wound when imperfectly cleansed as they usually were; and substituted non-irritating ligatures which nature herself was able to remove by the process of absorption. The recognition of this antiseptic principle effected a much needed revolution in surgery, and in this revolution acupressure was practically annihilated. Simpson did not live long enough to see the complete establishment of the Listerian principle; at