a hacking cough. Laennec is perishing of tuberculosis. He passes away holding in his hand a cross. He dies modestly, forgetting that the stethoscope has done more for mankind than the crucifix.

Laennec's name remained the greatest in the history of tuberculosis until the epochal evening, two generations later, when Robert Koch read his paper, The Etiology of Tuberculosis, announcing that a short rod-shaped bacterium was the sole and only causative agent of the universal scourge. Suffering mankind now awaits him who will discover a remedy to destroy Dr Koch's bacillus. In high expectation Koch himself proclaimed that he had found a specific; but tuberculin is a stain-the only one- on the Hanoverian's bright escutcheon. The Jenner of tuberculosis has not yet arisen; when he comes, when he brings to the medical market the blessed drug that will materially help to transform consumptives into normal human beings, the historical student will join in the general rejoicing, but he will not forget how much the world owes to the previous labors of René Laennec.

(1811-1870)

SIMPSON AND CHLOROFORM

SIMPSON AND CHLOROFORM

I also attended on two occasions the operating theater in the hospital at Edinburgh, and saw two very bad operations, one on a child, but I rushed away before they were completed. Nor did I ever attend again, for hardly any inducement would have been strong enough to make me do so; this being long before the blessed days of chloroform. The two cases fairly haunted me for many a long year.

CHARLES DARWIN.
Behold me waiting-waiting for the knife;
A little while, and at a leap I storm
The thick, sweet mystery of chloroform,
The drunken dark, the little death-in-life.
- WILLIAM ERNEST HENLEY.

A GOSSAMER mist glided out of cloudland, floating quietly and falling gently on the crags of the shore. The delicate water-dust struck the points, settled on the peaks, and broke into a vaporous fog. The opaque haze bedimmed the air, but the careful pilot in the sea below steered his passengers along the southern coast of the Firth of Forth. To the castled county of hilly Linlithgow were the tourists bound. Toward the green knolls that divide the lake in twain were they traveling. They were on their way to the remains of the finest ruin in Scotland - the Linlithgow Palace.

―――――

They walked around the fountain whose waters had once bubbled for the delight of royalty - now as dry as a rill that has ceased to be fed by rain. They looked at the chambers in which were born James II, James V, and Mary Stuart. They stood on the very spot where King Fieryface, from the window above, had hurled the lifeless body of the Earl of Douglas. They climbed the spiral staircase till they came to the bower where Queen Margaret used to wait for James IV,— who never returned from Flodden Field.

They lifted their eyes and saw the famous battlefield of

Bannockburn. Here Robert Bruce defeated the English army, restored Scottish independence, and gave Robert Burns a chance to write what Carlyle called the mightiest war-ode in the world - Scots wha hae wi' Wallace bled.

Surely the scene is romantic enough, and many would fain dwell longer in the enchanted vicinity and imagine a chieftain fighting in every cave and cliff, while the minstrels chanted ballads o' the border. Some would sentimentalize on the kings and queens whose blue-blooded bones are moldering like the walls of their favorite castle.

But no pen of ours can scratch a line of praise for monarch or warrior. Besides, lest it be imagined that every goose in Linlithgow is a swan, and all the lads and lassies be of blood-royal, we hasten to add that here lived, with his wife and family, a simple baker named Simpson.

Seven children tarried in the old home-nest, and grew lusty on their father's bread. They loved each other heartily, and made merry under the paternal roof. Yet one day they were warned to be very quiet. The baker himself walked on tiptoe, and spoke in whispers. A nurse moved noiselessly thru the rooms.

Plaintive moans were heard. Such sounds were not strange to Simpson, and still they frightened him. He knew the woman he loved was fighting the brave battle and facing the great mystery. The cries increased the pangs of childbirth are severe. Scream followed scream-the mother labored in the agony of agonies. A heartbreaking wail which the closed door could illy bar pierced every corner of the house and pierced likewise the soul of the father. Again that shriek escaped her, and the middle of the marrow of his bones seemed to shake. He rose in his nervousness, and shuddered with an uncommon fear.

He heard gasps. Was she struggling? Was she trying to breathe? Was she dying? Ah, what a shrill, keen outcry! How long must it last? Will it never end? Is there nothing to stop such suffering? Can the physician offer no remedy to