It has sometimes been claimed by metropolitan physicians that the rural brethren are slow to avail themselves of the various discoveries in medicine and surgery, and that they go on very much as their grand mothers did. Here as elsewhere in the universe there are compensations. Your country doctor can now look back a little, and with regard to many of the startling advances of these latter years he can see that the “advance” has been backward; and he is not quite sorry that his bucolic inertia has kept him from doing urban oöphorectomy upon all his hysterical female acquaintances. On other occasions he accepts the dicta of the medical centers with alacrity, and refuses to be called off when the fashion changes. This was seen in the case of coal tar. No sooner had the chemists, private docents, assistant physicians, and royal and imperial professors of Germany and Austria, announced the mighty powers of antipyrine, than he began to employ it, and a little later its congeners, to drive fever and pain out of the world. In many a remote country village this policy is still followed so vigorously that fever patients are kept blue and sometimes black by frequent and heroic doses of coal tar; and yet the great majority survive in spite of the disease and the antipyretic. Very lately a rampant enemy of coal tar wrote: “While in the medical centers the coal tar antipyretics are being reluctantly abandoned, it will be long ere less enlightened rural practitioner will let this comforting drug slip from his fond grasp.” Here then we have the two extremes; and here again sound practice lies about midway between them. These antipyretics when used with skill and caution can be made, in many cases, to replace with advantage, morphine on the one hand, and cold baths on the other. Surely, medicines capable of playing such a part in therapeutics, deserve careful consideration. 245 Prospect Ave., Mount Vernon, N. Y. * * * * * EFFECTS OF MORPHINE ON THE FEMALE ORGANS.—In a paper recently read before the Obstetric Society of St. Petersburg, Passower related the history of two cases, which confirms the opinion already supported by the observation of others, that the long continued use of morphine eventually leads to atrophy of the female generative organs. In both cases amenorrhœa was present; intra-uterine measurements taken during a period of two years showed a diminution in the size of its cavity from 5.1 to 1.9 inches.—_Exchange._ _ACTIONS OF DRUGS ON THE INTESTINES._ By W. C. CALDWELL, M.D., Professor of Materia Medica, and Director Pharmacological Laboratory, College of Physicians and Surgeons, Chicago. _Concluded from page 164._ METHODS OF EXPERIMENT TO DETERMINE WHERE A DRUG ACTS TO PRODUCE CATHARSIS.