The enthusiasts sat at the table and inhaled the particular substance under trial from tumblers or saucers; but the summer of 1847 passed away, and the autumn was commenced before he succeeded in finding any substance which at all fulfilled his requirements. All this time he was battling for anaesthesia, which, particularly in its application to midwifery, was meeting with what appears now as an astonishing amount of opposition, on varying grounds from all sorts and conditions of persons; but the vigour and power of his advocacy and defence of the practice in the days when laughing-gas and ether were the only known agents, were as nothing to that which he exerted after his own discovery at the end of 1847. The suggestion to try chloroform first came from a Mr. Waldie, a native of Linlithgowshire, settled in Liverpool as a chemist. It was a "curious liquid," discovered and described in 1831 by two chemists, Soubeiran and Liebig, simultaneously but independently. In 1835 its chemical composition was first accurately ascertained by Dumas, the famous French chemist. Simpson was apparently not aware that early in 1847 another French chemist, Flourens, had drawn attention to the effect of chloroform upon animals, or he would probably have hastened to use it upon himself experimentally, instead of putting away the first specimen obtained as unlikely; it was heavy and not volatile looking, and less attractive to him than other substances. How it finally came to be tried is best described in the words of Simpson's colleague and neighbour, Professor Miller, who used to look in every morning at nine o'clock to see how the enthusiasts had fared in the experiments of the previous evening.