Chloral hydrate seems singularly efficient in producing the semblance of death,--so completely, indeed, as to deceive even the elect. Dr. Richardson states that at the meeting of the British Association at Exeter, some pigeons which had been put to sleep by the needle injection of a large dose of chloral, "fell into such complete resemblance of death that they passed for dead among an audience containing many physiologists and other men of science. For my own part," he proceeds, "I could detect no sign of life in them, and they were laid in one of the out-offices of the museum of the infirmary as dead. In this condition they were left late at night, but in the following morning they were found alive, and as well as if nothing hurtful had happened to them." Similar effects seem to be produced by the deadly poisons cyanogen gas and hydrocyanic acid, though in the following case, narrated by Dr. Richardson, the animal experimented upon (not with the idea of eventually restoring it to life) belonged to a race so specially tenacious of life that some may consider only one of its proverbial nine lives to have been affected. In the laboratory of a large drug establishment a cat, "by request of its owner, was killed, as was assumed, instantaneously and painlessly by a large dose of Scheele's acid. The animal appeared to die without a pang, and, presenting every appearance of death, was laid in a sink to be removed on the next morning. At night the animal was lying still in form of death in the tank beneath a tap. In the morning it was found alive and well, but with the fur wet from the dropping of water from the tap." This fact was communicated to Dr. Richardson by an eminent chemist under whose direct observation it occurred, in corroboration of an observation of his own similar in character. Our old friend alcohol (if friend it can be called) possesses the power of suspending active vitality without destroying life, or at any rate without depriving the muscles of their excitability. Dr. Richardson records the case of a drunken man who, while on the ice at the Welsh Harp lake, fell into the water through an opening in the ice, and was for more than fifteen minutes completely immersed. He was extricated to all appearance dead, but under artificial respiration was restored to consciousness, though he did not survive for many hours. On the whole, alcoholic suspension of life does not appear to be the best method available. To test it, the patient must first get "very, very drunk," and even then, like the soldiers in the old song, must go on drinking, lest the experiment should terminate simply in the fiasco of a drunken sleep. The last agent for suspending life referred to by Dr. Richardson is pure oxygen. But he has not yet obtained such information on the power of oxygen in this respect as he hopes to do.