350 THE POPULAR SCIENCE MONTHLY. 



Thus, among the fishes, we have in the regions of closest com- 

 petition this degenerate and non-fishlike type, lurking in holes 

 among the rocks, or creeping in the sand, thieves and scavengers 

 among fishes. The eels thus fill a place otherwise left unfilled. 

 In their way they are perfectly adapted to the lives they lead. A 

 multiplicity of vertebral joints is useless to the typical fish, but 

 to the eel, strength and suppleness are everything. No armature 

 of fin or scale or bone is so desirable as its power of escaping 

 through the smallest opening. 



DEATH OF PROFESSOR BILLROTH. 



PROF. CHRISTIAN THEODOR ALBERT BILLROTH, one 

 of the most eminent surgeons of the century, died at the 

 Austrian winter resort Abbazia, on the Adriatic, February 6, 

 1894, in the sixty-fifth year of his age. He was born at Bergen, 

 on the island of Riigen, the son of a Swedish Lutheran pastor, 

 April 26, 1829 ; began the study of medicine in 1848 at Greifs- 

 wald, in Pomerania, and, having continued his course at Got- 

 tingen and Berlin, was graduated in medicine from the latter 

 university in 1852. He then traveled, after the manner of Ger- 

 man professional students, visiting the schools of Paris and 

 Vienna ; served for several years as an assistant in the clinic of 

 Prof, von Langenbeck, in Berlin ; qualified as Privat Docent in 

 the University of Berlin in 1856 ; became Professor of Surgery 

 at Zurich in 1858, and in 1867 at Vienna, where he spent the rest 

 of his professional life. He was made a member of the Austrian 

 Chamber of Peers in 1887. 



The beginning of his career as a professor in the University 

 of Zurich was very modest. He had only ten pupils during his 

 first semester, and his private practice, he was accustomed to say, 

 was not enough " to pay for his morning cup of coffee." His 

 reputation, however, quickly grew; students nocked to his lec- 

 tures ; and with the co-operation of eminent colleagues, notably 

 Griesinger, the British Medical Journal says, he in a few years 

 raised the Medical Faculty of Zurich to a prominent place among 

 German-speaking schools. His clinic in Vienna, the same jour- 

 nal observes, has been for more than twenty six years "a kind of 

 surgical Mecca to which scientific pilgrims from all parts of the 

 world have resorted in constantly increasing numbers. . . . Here 

 his operative triumphs were won. He excised the larynx for can- 

 cer in 1868 ; performed resection of the oesophagus ; and first re- 

 sected the stomach in 1881 for removing cancer of the pylorus. 

 During the Franco-German War of 1870-'71 he served in the mili- 



