endeavour his colleague Morton, who had not only been associated in his experiments, but had been deeply interested in the subject for many years. William Thomas Green Morton was born in 1819; his father was a farmer at Charlton, Massachusetts. He qualified as a dentist at Baltimore, and entered into successful practice at Boston. Fired with the same ambition as Wells, he made attempts to extract teeth painlessly with the assistance of drugs administered, or sometimes of hypnotism. In December, 1844, after Wells's failure with nitrous oxide gas, he wisely abandoned that agent and investigated another which promised better results. He experimented first with a drug known as _chloric ether_, but failing to get the desired effect, and at the suggestion of the aforementioned Dr. Jackson, he proceeded to investigate the effect of ordinary ether. The first experiments were made on animals, and were so encouraging that he believed he had at last found the desired agent, provided the effect on human beings corresponded with that upon dumb creatures. Boldly and heroically he made the necessary experiment upon himself, and on September 30, 1846, inhaled ether from a handkerchief while shut up in his room and seated in his own operating-chair. He speedily lost consciousness, and in seven or eight minutes awoke in possession of the greatest discovery that had ever been revealed to suffering humanity. We can picture the man gradually awakening in his chair first, to the consciousness of his surroundings and then to the consciousness of his great achievement; sitting with his physical frame excited by the influence of the drug which he had inhaled, and his soul stirred to its deepest depth by the expanding thought of the far-reaching effects of what he had done.