Those who opposed him with this curious idea, that pain after all was beneficial, were some of them men of no mean standing in the profession. Gull, Bransby Cooper, and Nunn were amongst those whom he had to silence. After replying to their arguments _seriatim_ with all his polemic power, he referred them once more to the evidence of facts and of facts alone as set forth by his statistics. Had he lived but a twelvemonth longer than he did he would have been able to conjure up a picture of the incalculable amount of suffering prevented by the eighteen hundred pounds of chloroform which were forwarded to the rival armies from one firm of chemists alone during the Franco-Prussian war; happily for the wounded within and around Paris, there was then no longer any doubt as to the propriety of employing anaesthetics. The _religious_ objections to the use of anaesthetics could scarcely be met with statistics. Foolish as they now appear to us after the lapse of time, and with the practice they attempted to repel universally adopted, they were nevertheless urged in good faith by clergy and laity of various denominations. The same kind of bigotry had met the introduction of vaccination, and Simpson himself remembered how many people had opposed the emancipation of the negroes on the ground that they were the lineal descendants of Ham, of whom it was said "a servant of servants shall he be unto his brethren." Sir Walter Scott reminds us, in "Old Mortality," of the spirit which met the introduction of fanners to separate the chaff from the corn, which displaced the ancient method of tossing the corn in the air upon broad shovels. Headrigg reproved Lady Bellenden for allowing the new process to be used on her farm, "thus impiously thwarting the will of Divine Providence by raising a wind for your leddyship's ain particular use by human art, instead of soliciting it by prayer or waiting patiently for whatever dispensation of wind Providence was pleased to send upon the sheeling hill." To-day in South Africa the same spirit is seen. Honest countryfolk of European descent are earnestly counselled by their spiritual advisers to submit patiently to the plague of locusts on the ground that it comes as a punishment from Providence. These worthy men stolidly witness their cornfields and their grass lands being eaten bare before their eyes in a few hours, whilst their more enlightened neighbours, brought up in another faith, resort with success to all sorts of artifices to ward off the destructive little invaders.