One would think that such a boon as Simpson had here offered to the world would have been gratefully--not to say greedily--accepted by all. Simpson's position was such as to give the new anesthetic every advantage that his already great reputation could attach to it, and it became at once the agent in common use in midwifery practice. But the Scotch clergy of his day still possessed altogether too much of the old fanatic spirit of the church of the middle ages. One is never allowed to forget, in scanning the history of medicine, how bitterly the church has opposed, until recently, every advance in our science and our art. It was in A. D. 995, for instance, that the son of one of the Venetian Doges was married, in Venice, to a sister of the emperor of the Eastern Roman Empire. At the marriage feast the princess produced a silver fork and gold spoon, table novelties which excited both amusing and angry comment. But the Venetian aristocracy took up with this new table fad, and forks and spoons as substitutes for fingers soon became the fashion. But the puissant church disapproved most strongly even of this arrangement, for priests went so far as to say, "to use forks was to deliberately insult the kind Providence which had given to man fingers on each hand." It was this same spirit that led the Scotch clergy to attack Simpson most vehemently and denounce him from their pulpits as one who violated the moral law, for they said: "Is it not ordained in Scripture, 'in sorrow shalt thou bring forth children?' and yet this man would introduce a substance calculated to mitigate this sorrow." We of to-day can scarcely imagine the rancor with which these attacks were made for many months. Finally, however, these fanatic defenders of the faith were routed by a quotation from the same Scriptures in which they claimed to find their authority; for Simpson, most adroitly turning upon them with their own weapons, called their attention to the first chapter of Genesis, in which an account of Eve's creation appears, and reminded them that when Eve was formed from the rib of Adam, the Lord "caused a deep sleep to fall upon" him. So weak was their cause that with this single quotation their opposition subsided and within a week or two the entire Scotch clergy was silenced. Sir James Simpson received from his own government that which was never accorded to Morton: that is, due recognition of the great service he had rendered humanity. He died in 1870, and upon his bust, which stands in Westminster Abbey, are the following words: "To whose genius and beneficence the world owes the blessings derived from the use of chloroform for the relief of suffering."