in the like conditions, would have been done by ourselves or any others. The case was one in which it was made necessary to satisfy, if possible, both gratitude and justice. This might have been easy if there had been only one claimant; gratitude might have been profuse and bountiful, and justice might have approved or, at least, been silent. But there were never less than two, and generally four, claimants; and where gratitude might with a free hand have been ready to give honours and rewards to them all, justice was invoked that the gifts might be in measure proportioned to their several merits. Then gratitude, waiting on justice, became irresolute and cold, or was distracted by new objects.

It may seem very hard; but let any one or, much better, let any four or five, as if sitting in council, think what they would have done; how they would have satisfied at once their gratitude and their sense of justice; how much, suppose, of any great vote by Congress they would have given to each claimant ?

How much should Long have had? He first used a true, safe, and sufficient anæsthetic in surgery, and used it with such success that, if he had quickly published his facts, he could not but have been regarded as the great discoverer. It was the fault of his position more than of himself that his facts were not sooner known; and for his delay he might, in so grave a case, plead prudence. But was he then to have no reward?

And what should have been Wells's share? He certainly discovered the use 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 anaesthetics. 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 honour.

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 anesthetics might have been, at least, long delayed-boldness, perseverance, selfconfidence. While Long waited, and Wells turned back, and Jackson was thinking, and those to whom they had talked were neither acting VOL. VI.-No. 34.

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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 the time of the award, the value of nitrous oxide was so hidden by the greater value of ether that Wells's 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. And if we suppose 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 anæsthetics 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 deliberately 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 favourite 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 sulphuric 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 honour 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 chance of putting an end to it as they would have rushed to escape from starving. But it was not so; the misery was so frequent, so nearly customary, deemed so inevitable, that, though it excited horror when it was talked of, it did not excite to strenuous action. Remedies were wished for and sometimes tried, but all was done vaguely and faintly; there was neither hope enough to excite intense desire, nor desire enough to encourage hope; the misery was put up with just as we now put up with typhoid fever and sea-sickness, with local floods and droughts, with the waste of health and wealth in the pollutions of rivers, with hideous noises and foul smells, and many other miseries. Our successors, when they have remedied or prevented them, will look back on them with horror, and on us with wonder and contempt for what they will call our idleness or blindness or indifference to suffering.

JAMES PAGET.

INDEX TO VOL. VI.

The titles of articles are printed in italics.