POSTSCRIPT. 



For the last month or two, newspapers and periodicals have been 

 full of accounts of painless operations performed on individuals under 

 the influence of the fumes of sulphuric ether. There is scarcely an 

 hospital in Great Britain, in which its effects have not been tested ; 

 and in Calcutta, Madras, and Bombay, additional experiments have 

 been made. There seems no reason to doubt that the discovery of 

 the application of this hypnotic will form a most important era in sur- 

 gery, as it differs from all other ones, in the facility with which it can 

 be used, and in the certainty of its results. One might have expected, 

 that occasional accidents, such as apoplexy from over-poisoning by the 

 fumes, might have occurred, but such does not appear to be the case, 

 and it would seem that we have few agents on the effects of which 

 we can better depend. No dentist now ventures to operate without 

 trying the effects of the ether, and it is certainly a grand thing to 

 escape the horrors of tooth-drawing, even though we may not go 

 the length of the boy, who wished to " have another tooth out for the 

 fun of the thing." 



The lateness in the arrival of our Foreign Journals, prevents our 

 being able in this Number to allude to various matters of interest, 

 which are at present attracting notice. 



Thus, Professor Weber of Leipzic states, that he has discovered 

 a rudimentary uterus, or rather the vestige of an uterus, in man, and 

 in the male of the horse, pig, dog, cat, rabbit, and beaver ; and 

 we observe that M. Blandet has been reproducing sounds from the 

 larynx of corpses by dexterous manipulation, which has led him to 

 infer, that only one of the chordae vocales is essential to voice, just as 

 only one eye is required for vision. Liebig too, who has been carry- 

 ing on an angry controversy with Mulder, now states as the result 

 of his experiments, that proteine has no existence. 



March \6th, 1847. 



