COMPARATIVE SAFETV OF ETHER AND CHLOROFORM. 593 
ulcers, and not the lymph contained in the vesicles which 
appear at the outset of the disease, and failed. The lymph 
has now been tried by M. Lafosse, with the results stated 
above ; but it should be recollected that others have failed in 
the same experiment. It is extremely probable, as very 
justly observed by the editor of La France Medicate , that the 
success and the failures depend on certain peculiarities which 
have not as yet been ascertained.— Lancet . 
FOREIGN MATTER IN THE LUNGS. 
“ If you examine,” says M. Pouchet, “the bodies of animals 
who live in our towns and in our houses, you will be aston¬ 
ished at the enormous quantity of starch contained in their 
respiratory organs. In birds you will find it even in the 
middle of their bones. Particles of soot, filaments of the 
different kinds of textures of which our clothes are made, 
are also found there in great abundance. But the further 
the animal lives from a town, the more scarce become these 
bodies. In animals and birds living in the midst of forests, 
you will scarcely find any at all of them ; in their case the 
respiratory apparatus is, on the contrary, filled with a large 
quantity of vegetable debris , chlorophylle, &c. I have found 
in the lungs of man the same atmospheric corpuscles as in 
animals. I found in two persons who died in one of our 
hospitals—a man and a woman—and whose lungs I injected, 
a notable quantity of fecula, normal or after panification', 
particles of silica, and fragments of glass; fragments of 
painted wood of a beautiful red colour; debris of clothes, 
and a larva of a microscopic arachnis still alive .”—Chemical 
News . 
COMPARATIVE SAFETY OF ETHER AND CHLOROFORM. 
The Society of Medicine of Lyons has, after long discus¬ 
sion, come to the conclusion,—That ether as an anaesthetic 
is more dangerous than chloroform ; that anaesthesia is 
obtained as well and as certainly by ether as by chloroform ; 
and therefore that ether ought always to be preferred to 
chloroform, the inconvenience of it being slight. 
