reached when the surgeon removes a thread from his garment, and the patient not merely recognizes it as such, but triumphantly tells its hue. The Western ophthalmic surgeon, with his wide incision and his anxiety for the safety of the vitreous, can never savour such dramatic moments as these. They carry us back to the descriptions of the early Christian miracles, with all the mental and spiritual associations, which enwrap such stories as those of Bartimæus, and of the pools of Siloam and Bethesda. Alas that life’s “hereafters” should so often be fraught with disillusionment, disappointment, and suffering! Palestine and its storied past rise before us as we read how the vaidyan called for a white cloth and for water, how he dipped the cloth in the fluid and washed out the sufferer’s eye therewith, how he made a paste and smeared it over the skin around the brow, how he closed the eye with “clean white linen,” and then sent the erstwhile blind man rejoicing away. Over the abyss of nearly twenty centuries, the East stretches out her unfaltering hand to the past of the nearer East, whilst the West looks on in wonder, not unmixed with admiration, for a spirit which the corroding passage of time seems unable either to fret or to change. There is a step of the procedure which has been purposely left to the last, as its interest is psychologic, and not surgical. It is common to both methods of operation. I refer to the anointing of the eye with the blood of a freshly killed fowl. It is a measure in which superstition, cunning, self-preservation, and greed, overwhelm and mask a faint and feeble therapeutic design. The sacrificial element is present, and a hazy idea that the death of the votive bird may turn evil from the patient looms in the background. Next comes the need to mask the shedding of the patient’s blood, since he is often told that no operation is to be performed, but that a mere “medicinal application” is to be made; the blood of the outraged bird covers the guilt of the vaidyan’s falsehood. Largest of all towers the fact that the curry-pot even of a worker of surgical marvels needs constant replenishing, and that fowl is an excellent substitute for mutton on such occasions. Lastly, these men seem to believe that the coagulation of the fowl’s blood helps to close the puncture. In view of the dirty condition of the instruments which they introduce into the interior of the eye, this last factor may practically be neglected. CHAPTER III THE INDIAN COUCHER AND HIS HABITS