of nitrous oxide, and from his success with it may be traced, not only the knowledge of its whole present utility, but the continuous history of the complete discovery of anæsthetics. True, he soon left the field, disheartened and as if in distrust of his own work; but before he left it he had set Morton on the track, and had thus contributed to the discovery of the uses of ether and chloroform. These, surely, were great merits; what should have been their reward?

Jackson's claims were of a different kind. He had what may be called a scientific idea of the anesthetic use of ether; but he gave it no active life, no clear, persuasive expression. His mind was chiefly occupied in fields of science far apart from active surgery; the great idea needed transplantation. But when we see to what it grew, we must admit that he who bred and nurtured it, and then gave it to be planted, had great claims to honor.

Morton answered well to the definition

given, it is said, by Sydney Smith: "He is not the inventor who first says the thing, but he who says it so long, loudly, and clearly, that he compels mankind to hear him." Without either skill, or knowledge, or ingenuity, he supplied the qualities without which the complete discovery of anaesthetics might have been, at least, long delayed-boldness, perseverance, self-confidence. While Long waited, and Wells turned back, and Jackson was thinking, and those to whom they had talked were neither acting nor thinking, Morton, the "practical man," went to work and worked resolutely. He gave ether successfully in severe surgical operations, he loudly proclaimed his deeds, and "compelled mankind to hear him." His claim was very

clear.

Probably most people would agree that all four deserved reward; but that which the controversy and the patent and the employment of legal advisers made it necessary to determine was, whether more than one deserved reward, and, if more than one, the proportion to be assigned to each. Here was the difficulty. The French Academy of Sciences in 1850 granted equal shares in the Monthyon Prize to Jackson and to Morton; but Long was unknown to them, and, at

And if we sup

the time of the award, the value of nitrous oxide was so hidden by the greater value of ether that Wells' claim was set aside. A memorial column was erected at Boston, soon after Morton's death in 1868, and here the difficulty was shirked by dedicating the column to the discovery of ether, and not naming the discoverers. The difficulty could not be thus settled; and, in all probability, our supposed council of four or five would not solve it. One would prefer the claims of absolute priority; another those of suggestive science; another the courage of bold adventure; sentiment and sympathy would variously affect their judgments. pose that they, like the American Congress, had to discuss their differences within sound of such controversies as followed Morton's first use of ether, or during a war of pamphlets, or under burdens of parliamentary papers, we should expect that their clearest decision would be that a just decision could not be given, and that gratitude must die if it had to wait till distributive justice could be satisfied. The gloomy fate of the American discoverers makes one wish that gratitude could have been let flow of its own impulse; it would have done less wrong than the desire for justice did. A lesson of the whole story is that gratitude and justice are often incompatible; and that when they conflict, then, usually, summum jus summa injuria.

Another lesson, which has been taught in the history of many other discoveries, is clear in this-the lesson that great truths may be very near us and yet be not discerned. Of course, the way to the discovery of anesthetics was much more difficult than it now seems. It was very difficult to produce complete insensibility with nitrous oxide till it could be given undiluted and unmixed; this required much better apparatus than Davy or Wells had; and it was hardly possible to make such apparatus till India-rubber manufactures were improved. It was very difficult to believe that profound and long insensibility could be safe, or that the appearances of impending death were altogether fallacious. Bold as Davy was, bold even to recklessness in his experiments on himself, he would not have ventured to produce deliber

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ately in any one a state so like a final suffocation as we now look at unmoved. It was a boldness not of knowledge that first made light of such signs of dying, and found that what looked like a sleep of death was as safe as the beginning of a night's rest. Still, with all fair allowance for these and other difficulties, we cannot but see and wonder that for more than forty years of this century a great truth lay unobserved, though it was covered with only so thin a veil that a careful physiological research must have discovered it. The discovery ought to have been made by following the suggestion of Davy. The book in which he wrote that nitrous oxide-capable of destroying physical pain-may probably be used with advantage during surgical operations,' was widely read, and it would be hard to name a man of science more widely known and talked of than he was. Within two years of the publication of his " Researches," he was appointed to a professorship in the Royal Institution; and in the next year he was a favorite in the fashionable as well as in the scientific world; and all his life through he was intimately associated with those among whom all the various motives for desiring to find some means "capable of destroying physical pain would be most strongly felt. Curiosity, the love of truth, the love of marvels, the desire of ease, self-interest, benevolence all were alert in the minds of men and women who knew and trusted whatever Davy said or wrote, but not one mind was earnestly directed to the rare promise which his words contained. His own mind was turned with its full force to other studies; the interest in surgery which he may have felt during his apprenticeship at Bodmin was lost in his devotion to poetry, philosophy, and natural science, and there is no evidence that he urged others to undertake the study which he left. Even his biographers, his brother, Dr. John Davy, and his intimate friend, Dr. Paris, both of whom were very capable physicians and men of active intellect, say nothing of his suggestion of the use of nitrous oxide. It was overlooked and utterly forgotten till the prophecy was fulfilled by those who had never heard of it. The same may be said of what Faraday, if it were he, wrote of the influence of sul

phuric ether. All was soon forgotten, and the clue to the discovery, which would have been far easier with ether than with nitrous oxide, for it needed no apparatus, and even required mixture with air, was again lost. One could have wished that the honor of bringing so great a boon to men, and so great a help in the pursuit of knowledge, had been won by some of those who were giving themselves with careful cultivation to the search for truth as for its own sake. But it was not so; science was utterly at fault; and it was shown that in the search for truth there are contingencies in which men of ready belief and rough enterprise, seeking for mere utility even with selfish purposes, can achieve more than those who restrain themselves within the range of what seems reasonable.

Such instances of delay in the discovery of truth are always wondered at, but they are not uncommon. Long before Jenner demonstrated the utility of vaccination it was known in Gloucestershire that they who had had cow-pox could not catch the small-pox. For some years before the invention of electric telegraphy, Professor Cumming, of Cambridge, when describing to his class the then recent discovery by Oersted of the power of an electric current to deflect a magnet, used to say, "Here, then, are the elements which would excellently serve for a system of telegraphy." Yet none of his hearers, active and cultivated as they were, were moved from the routine of study. Laennec quotes a sentence from Hippocrates which, if it had been worthily studied, might have led to the full discovery of auscultation. Thus it often has been; and few prophecies can be safer than that our successors will wonder at us as we do at those before us; will wonder that we did not discern the great truths which they will say were all around us, within reach of any clear, earnest mind.

They will wonder, too, as we may, when we study the history of the discovery of anesthetics, at the quietude with which habitual miseries are borne; at the very faint impulse to action which is given by even great necessities when they are habitual. Thinking of the pain of surgical operations, one would think that men would have rushed after the barest

-Belgravia Magazine.

CHAPTER XXVIII.

HOLMHURST..

MR. ASHLEY, peering cautiously from behind the shelter of his newspaper, after half an hour or so of travelling, was relieved to see that his opposite neighbor, so far from being in floods of tears, as he had expected her to be, was sitting upright in her place, and gazing calmly, if somewhat abstractedly, at the flying landscape. This discovery, together with a vague consciousness that the occasion called for some observation of a sympathetic nature, emboldened him to remark: "These partings are very distressing."

"Yes," said Jeanne.

"But they are what everybody has to go through, sooner or later, and one mustn't give way. I am glad to see that you don't give way. And if there were no partings, don't you know?" continued Mr. Ashley, struggling manfully to say something original, "if there weren't any partings, there would be no meetings.'

This evidently struck him as being well put, for, after a pause, he repeated: "If there were no partings, there would be no meetings; we must remember that."

Jeanne bent her head slightly, and gave him a little faint smile. She had already recognized in her uncle a worthy, but inferior species of being, with whom it was wholly unnecessary to converse, and whose nature fitted him rather to obey than to command.

Her own nature, as we are aware, was of the opposite kind; and so Mr.

Ashley, who had the ready instinct of a dull man, soon discovered. Before the day was at an end, he and his niece had found their respective levels with regard to one another, and were quite comfortable together. He was greatly impressed by Jeanne's quiet repose of manner, by the calmness with which she utterly declined to be hurried or flustered when the time came for them to change carriages, and by the matter-of-course way in which she ordered one of the railway officials to fetch some water for Turco before she would consent to continue her journey. At the frontier, where, during those troublous times, it was customary to make a prodigious fuss over passports, and where he was thrown into a fever of mingled indignation and alarm by a frowning individual who required him to prove his identity, he finally surrendered all semblance of authority into the hands of his charge, who made things smooth without any difficulty at all.

"I can't make head or tail of these foreigners-never could," he remarked apologetically, as he sank back, with a sigh of exhaustion, upon the cushions of the railway-carriage. "You'd better do the talking, Jane; you know how to manage 'em."

So from that time forth the command of the expedition was taken up by Mademoiselle de Mersac, vice Mr. Ashley, superseded. That same evening the travellers reached Geneva, and the next day journeyed on to Bâle, and the next to Cologne, and so northwards. Ashley, relieved of the responsibility of searching time-tables, making calcula

Mr.

tions in foreign coin, and speaking tongues only partially known to him, was in high good humor, and declared several times that he had never enjoyed a trip more in his life. He conceived a high estimate of his niece's character and abilities; the only thing that vexed him about her being the unfortunate accident of her nationality, which was fatal to a free interchange of ideas upon the absorbing events of the day. The papers at that time were full of the proclamations and manifestoes of the young dictator of Tours, for whose windy utterances Mr. Ashley nourished a truly noble and British contempt, which, of course, he was obliged under the circumstances to suppress as best he could. From time to time, to be sure, being charged as it were to bursting point with bottled-up wrath, he was fain to break out into the commencement of a diatribe against that fellow Gombetter"; but it must be recorded to his credit that he never failed to cut short his sentence with a profuse apology, and an explanation that his disparaging remarks had no reference to the French people.

46

"Plucky fellows, and good soldiers when they are well led," he was kind enough to say. Our old allies in the Crimea, too; we haven't forgotten that in England, I assure you. After which he would generally fall foul of King William's pious telegrams, that being a subject upon which he felt himself at liberty to use as strong language as he pleased.

As far as Jeanne was concerned, he might have spoken for or against her country without scruple. Her own private anxieties and sorrows were too much in her mind just then to permit of her taking any great interest in public affairs; still less could she have brought herself to care what the opinion of this or that individual Englishman might be upon them.

Her one desire was to reach England, where she hoped she would find a letter from Léon awaiting her arrival. The journey was not an enjoyable one to her, whatever it may have been to her companion, and she was glad to get to the end of it.

Landing on Dover pier, on a murky November afternoon, after a long passage through thick weather from Ostend, Jeanne took her first survey of her

mother's native land, and did not find it specially attractive to the eye. But she had not much time to spend in forming impressions, for Mr. Ashley, who had rushed off to the bookstall as soon as he had set foot on land, came hurrying back, loaded with newspapers, and brimming over with the latest intelligence.

44

Here's a pretty kettle of fish!"' he. cried, as he scrambled into his place. "Russia's been tearing up the Treaty of Paris! I always knew how it would be. And, oh! here's a bit of good news for you, Jane. Your people have licked the Bavarians somewhere. Like to see the Telegraph? They've got a long account of it all."

The winter evening closed in. Dover, Ashford, Tunbridge, were soon left behind. Mr. Ashley denounced Prince Gortschakoff, and declared his conviction that the Gladstone Ministry was trifling with the honor of the country. Jeanne was still deep in the details of the battle of Coulmiers-an undoubted victory for the French arms at last— when the train came to a standstill at Sevenoaks, and her uncle, throwing open the door, exclaimed :

"By Jove! here we are already! Jump out, Jane; this is our station.

Jeanne obeyed this invitation by stepping down in her leisurely, deliberate way on to the platform. A servant relieved her of her shawis and umbrellas ; and in a few minutes she found herself seated by her uncle's side in a mailphaeton, being whirled along the muddy lanes at the full speed of a pair of gigantic horses.

"Bless us and save us, how these brutes do pull !" gasped Mr. Ashley. "It's enough to drag a man's arms out of their sockets. How were they going as you came along, Simpson?"

"Ran away the 'ole distance, sir," answered the man from behind. "Couldn't have stopped 'em in the first two miles, not if it had ha' bin ever so! Took 'em to Caterham and back, with the ladies, yesterday, too, sir. I never see such 'osses for work!"

"Ah!" grunted Mr. Ashley, evidently not ill-pleased. "They won't run away with me, I can tell them."

They managed to keep him pretty well occupied though, and left him little