Madeira he had just tasted was "but sad poor stuffabout a match for Garrow's trashy speech."

The Welsh judge looks upon it as a sort of suicide for an undistinguished lawyer to enter parliament. "Of all inferiority, the most marked is the disastrous lot of the barrister, who, failing in the law, quits his gown, and carries his tongue to market in parliament. Respectful as the House of Commons ever is to high station, to success at the bar, it is contemptuous in the extreme to the body of lawyers there who have failed under the wig. I remember some years ago, before I quitted parliament, an ingenious ruddy-looking young gentleman (he seemed only five-and-twenty, but proved much older) addressing the house in a maiden speech, clothed in a country gentleman's attire, of top-boots and leather breeches. He was listened to with the attention and even kindness which might be expected to attend such a performance, until he unhappily let fall the expression, "as I have had occasion to know on our circuit," when suddenly there burst forth a yell of indignation at the fraud under which he had obtained audience the kind of false colours he had been sailing under, and sailing, too, before the wind. Such a chorus, such a concert, concordia discors, such a storm of coughing, of laughing, of scraping, of calls of question, of roars of scorn and disgust, never greeted mine ears. It was, indeed, over in a minute; but the speech, too, was over, and nothing could have appeased it but the termination of that speech which it had brought about.'

was tried before the sessions for robbing a hen-roost, and acquitted for want of evidence against him. The chairman was ordering him to be discharged as a matter of course; but Raine said, though he fully agreed, yet he conceived it would be well to have him first whipt. The other justices repressed this ebullition of professional zeal, and explained the difference between justices and schoolmasters in respect of whipping.

NEW MEDICAL DISCOVERY. THE public journals for the last few weeks have been teeming with accounts of a new method of producing insensibility to pain. The discovery is of American origin, and seems to bid fair to become among the most eminent of the benefits yet bestowed upon suffering humanity. The inventors are Dr Charles J. Jackson, a distinguished chemist, and Dr Morton, a dentist of Boston. The process has been made the subject of a patent, principally, it is said, to prevent its abuse-a precaution which the singular properties of the remedy appear to justify. A considerable number of the gravest operations in surgery have been performed upon patients subject to its influence, and in most cases the result has been a complete freedom from suffering. We beg to present a short account of this remarkable process. It consists in the inhalation of, as it is supposed, the vapour of pure sulphuric ether. It is administered by means of a simple but peculiar apparatus. The patient is seated in the operating chair, and is requested to In the old Welsh circuits, the whole appearance of breathe through a mouth-piece, which is connected with the court was different from an English court: the ha- some appropriate apparatus for the vaporisation of the bits of the people, and even their dress, were distinct; ether, and is supplied with valve-work, which prevents and when, as in most cases, the witnesses could not talk the return of vitiated air to the apparatus. The reEnglish, and had to be examined by an interpreter, you spiration is continued for a few minutes, until the might well fancy yourself in a foreign country. Indeed, patient has lost all sensation, and very generally all in addressing the jury, whether by the bar or from the consciousness as well, and lies back apparently in a bench, it was but too obvious that the majority fre- gentle slumber. The sleep lasts, if the mouth-piece is quently understood but little of what was said to them. removed, for two or three minutes, and the inhaler In the north, the dialect of the witnesses was occasionally awakes considerably exhilarated by the operation. The puzzling enough. We used to hear people talk of the apparatus used by the inventors consisted simply of a house or the house-parts-meaning the kitchen; of a two-necked bottle, like that known as Woolf's, partly middenstead for a dunghill; of a stee for a ladder; of filled with sponges saturated with ether; that which lating for reckoning; and laking for playing; nay, of has been used in London is an adaptation of the welldarrock for day's work; and a trewthsin for a three known soda-water apparatus, North's. It has been weeks since. But in Wales there was much less in taken for granted in England that the liquid used is common between the natives of the country and the simply and only sulphuric ether; but the inventors professors of the law brought into the country to admi- themselves have not yet disclosed the true composition nister justice. This sometimes led to some odd mis- of the anodyne they employ. The experiments with takes: take, as an example, the jury, who, after hear- us have been made with ether alone, and their success ing a trial for sheep-stealing, in which the facts were, warrants the conclusion that this is the agent which that the sheep had been killed on the hill, and there has been used in Boston. Almost invariably, the first skinned, the robber taking away the carcase, and leav- result of the inhalation is to cause a little spasm of the ing the skin for fear of detection-all this was proved glottis, and cough, but this commonly vanishes after in evidence, but the jury supposed it to relate, not to a two or three inspirations, and the new atmosphere apsheep, but to a human being, and brought in, after some pears to be inhaled almost with avidity. Some persons hesitation, what they considered a safe verdict of man- become highly excited under its influence, and are posslaughter!' But the lawyers on these circuits were assessed with an irresistible desire to be in motion; but if comical in their way as the witnesses and juries. One the inhalation is continued, this excitement gives place of them, Clarke, all unintentionally to create a laugh, to a condition of complete etherial inebriation, and the and not very fond of any such testimony to his powers, patient becomes perfectly still and motionless. At this would now and then make his audience merry without stage there is a complete loss of volition, the hand may meaning it. As when the opposite counsel had been be lifted up, but it falls down powerless by the side of the pathetic on his orphan client's hard lot-" Gentlemen," inebriate; and if the eyelid is raised, it will no longer said Clarke, "why, I am myself an orphan"-he was close against a threatened blow: this is the moment for seventy odd years old-" people's fathers and mothers the operation. In this unconscious condition the pacannot live for ever." No one can doubt of the pathos tient will then remain for about three minutes; but it is raised before being suddenly dissipated by this unex- at the option of the operator to prolong the narcotism to pected sally-not of humour, but of mere anger at any fifteen, twenty, or even thirty minutes, without inconpathos having been imported into the cause. So, venience to the generality of patients. Thus the most when a witness whom he was pressing with his angry, tedious and severe operations of the surgeon, which and oftentimes scolding, cross-examination, suddenly seldom exceed twenty minutes, and are generally of a dropped down in a fit, and some said it was apoplectic much shorter duration, are capable of being performed -but privately Clarke heard it was epileptic-" My during the state of insensibility. The most curious lord," said he, "it's only epilepsy-she must answer the circumstance perhaps is, that the patient awakes from question," as if the courts had taken a distinction be- his lethargy almost at once; but for some hours after, he tween apoplexy and epilepsy.' The first time old experiences an unusual buoyancy of spirits, which only Raine,' an ex-schoolmaster, sat in judgment, a man evaporates with the etherial odour itself. In a con

utter forgetfulness of everything. The soul seems to have cast off its earthly clog, and to be wandering it knows not where in a word, there is a complete loss of individuality, a feeling as if one were another person altogether. At this time the operation was performedthe first tooth being extracted without a trace of pain, though it appeared to disturb the lethargic state, so that a dull pain of a trifling nature accompanied the removal of the second. Shortly afterwards the writer awoke, discovering, to his complete amazement, two grim-looking teeth on the table at his side. No ill effects followed.

THE COUNT CONFALONIERI. EVERY one who has read Silvio Pellico's affecting narrative of his imprisonment in Spielberg, the great state-prison of Austria, will recollect that one of his companions in misfortune was the Count Frederick Confalonieri or Gonfalionieri, as it is sometimes written. Pellico, blind, and otherwise injured in bodily health by his long confinement, still lives in northern Italy, but the newspapers have lately announced the death of his old friend Confalonieri.

Of the character of this now deceased victim of Austrian oppression, very different accounts are given, but all will allow that the penalty he paid for his errors was sufficiently severe. Some time ago, in speaking of his imprisonments and their effects, he gave in a few words the following impressive history:

siderable number of experiments the loss of sensation seems general, but the effects of the vapour are very various. Dr Bigelow, in the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, gives an account of the phenomena presented in several cases which came before him. A young man took his seat in the chair, and after inhaling for a short time, rejected the apparatus, and taking from his pocket a pencil and card, wrote and summed up figures. He was then asked if he would submit to the extraction of his tooth, and he assented. The tooth was extracted, and shortly after the young man recovered his senses. He was quite unconscious of any pain. Other patients manifested the activity of certain intellectual faculties; and some, while still insensible, will raise themselves in the chair if desired to do so. It is very general, at the moment when the instruments are used, to notice that there is an expression of pain upon the countenance of the intoxicated person: there is a frown, or a scowl, or even sometimes a moan is heard; but these appearances are entirely illusive; the patients have experienced no suffering whatever. One woinan exclaimed on recovering, That it was beautiful: she dreamed of being at home; it seemed as if she had been gone a month.' A boy, who is likely to become famous, was so enchanted with his sensations while two of his teeth were removed, as to insist upon the extraction of a third. With only one or two exceptions has any pain been experienced, most of the patients expressing themselves as totally unconscious of anything unpleasant. It would almost seem probable that the cases of partial failure- and they seem more proportionately frequent in England I am an old man now; yet by fifteen years my than in America - have their explanation in some soul is younger than my body! Fifteen years I existed, imperfections in the process of inhalation. A patient for I did not live-it was not life-in the self-same operated on in London by Mr Liston was not aware dungeon ten feet square! During six of those years I that his leg was removed until he was told so. A had a companion; during nine I was alone! I never young lady had five teeth extracted without being sen- could rightly distinguish the face of him who shared sible of the operation in the slightest degree. Tumours my captivity in the eternal twilight of our cell. The have been dissected out; the difficult, tedious, and first year we talked incessantly together; we related painful operation of lithotomy has been successfully our past lives, our joys for ever gone, over and over completed; and a number both of the capital and minor again. The next, we communicated to each other our operations of surgery have been performed, with com- thoughts and ideas on all subjects. The third year, we plete absence of pain, and without any unfavourable had no ideas to communicate; we were beginning to after-results. Nay, what is more marvellous still, and lose the power of reflection! The fourth, at the interwhat we believe the inventors could have scarcely anti- val of a month or so, we would open our lips to ask cipated, the process has been adopted in the practice of each other if it were indeed possible that the world midwifery-the first to try its efficacy in this depart- still went on as gay and bustling as when we formed a ment being Professor Simpson of Edinburgh, who has portion of mankind. The fifth, we were silent. The found it to succeed to admiration in relieving the pa- sixth, he was taken away, I never knew where, to exetient from pain and consequent exhaustion, and this cution or to liberty; but I was glad when he was gone; without obstructing in the least the ordinary efforts of even solitude was better than the dim vision of that nature. Such has been the prosperous commencement pale vacant face! After that I was alone, only one of the career of this new remedy-to which no man event broke in upon my nine years' vacancy. One day, will deny one of the first places in the list of blessings it must have been a year or two after my companion bestowed by medical science upon mankind. Simple, left me, the dungeon door was opened, and a voiceobvious, free from all show of mystery-except so far whence proceeding I knew not-uttered these words: as the physiological action of the ether is concerned-"By order of his imperial majesty, I intimate to you the discovery has, in the course of a few months, estab- that your wife died a year ago." Then the door was lished itself in the faith of the public as thoroughly as shut, and I heard no more; they had but flung this great the discoveries of Jenner, Harvey, and the other masters agony in upon me, and left me alone with it again.' of medical science. It is true that different operators may meet with different success, according to the perfection of the apparatus employed, and the susceptibility of the patient; but this is no more than what attends the introduction of every new process-expertness and certainty can only be acquired by an enlarged experience.

As the writer of this notice has undergone the etherial inebriation, and during that condition had two molar teeth removed, he can add his own personal experience to the entire credibility of the facts stated here. The sensations produced by the ether are extremely curious, if his own are a fair specimen of them, as it appears probable they are. A general thrill pervades the body to its very extremities at first, and there occur a series of, as it were, electric discharges in the brain-no better simile is at hand. These feelings give way to a dreamy state, in which external objects partly enter and partly appear excluded: to this follows an

It is painful to think that the man who could speak thus should have died not without a stain on his memory-unmerited, for anything we know, and at this distance it is difficult to get at the truth. The following appears in the Parisian correspondence of the Atlas newspaper :

"The death of Gonfalionieri, that former idol of our republican salons, has not created one single public expression of regret, nor given birth to a single "Ode to Liberty," or "Lament for the Brave," in any of the republican journals. He was among the few survivors of Spielberg tyranny. His history is a romance, not so much for his own adventures, as for the extraordinary affection and devotion he had inspired in his wife, who was one of the most lovely and accomplished women of her day. From the very hour of his arrest, which took place at a ball at Milan, she left him not, save to intercede with his persecutors. She spent her youth, her fortune, in her ceaseless endeavours to soften the hearts

are,

of them.

"The most important points of improvement are, however, those in which some principles of the sanitary report, in respect to the means of cleansing and ventilation for the working-classes, are carried out. Each set of rooms is furnished with a constant supply of water, and also with sinks for washing, and a water-closet, and means of communication with a dust shaft from the whole set of chambers, by which all dust and ashes might be removed at once from the apartments without the necessity of the inmates leav ing them. The party entered the rooms which were inhabited, and questioned the inmates as to their experience of rooms, attested to the superior conveniences of this One nursing mother, in a neat and well-kept set and exposure to the weather in a common town dwelling. arrangement, as a most important relief from the fatigue She had now no occasion to leave her child alone whilst she went to a distance to fetch water; neither had she to Keep dirty or waste water, or dirt or ashes in the room, until she could find time to carry them away. "She had now scarcely ever to go down stairs and leave her child." Each set of rooms was provided with one conduit for the ingress of fresh air, and another for the egress of vitiated air. Those examined were newly inhabited, but the immeto those who have visited such abodes in the entire absence diate sanitary effect of the arrangements was perceptible of offensive effluvia or of "close smells." This observation was extended to the whole range of buildings. The sinks in each room were trapped with bell-traps, as were all the openings to the drains and the gully-shoots in the paved courts and thoroughfares. A constant supply of water was secured, the house-drains were well flushed with water, and cesspools were entirely abolished. This range of buildings is perhaps the first practical example of the entire removal of one chief source of physical depression and pestilence common to all the existing dwellings of the working-classes in towns.

of his enemies, and finally laid down life itself, worn in fact, flats or sets of chambers, consisting of two sets out with her efforts, to save him from captivity and on each floor. Each set consists of one living-room and death, She followed, attired in her ball-dress, all two sleeping-rooms. The floors are of arched brick. The through the night of horror which changed his exist-living-room is floored with a hard Welsh fire-brick tile; ence from a powerful leader of a popular party to that the sleeping-room floors are boarded. The staircases are of a miserable and neglected captive. She cared not for of stone, with iron balustrades. The flat brick arches of the cold nor the rain, which fell in torrents; but at iron ties, and the whole building is fireproof. which the floors are constructed are tied together with each relay she descended from the carriage which conveyed her, to hover round that which contained her husband, heedless of the brutal jeers and rebuffs of the gensd'armes, who repulsed her with drawn sabres. At length, when, after some days' journey, they reached the gates of Spielberg, she fell upon her knees in supplication for one last word-one single word-before the dungeon closed upon him perhaps for ever. She was refused; and then she gave the cushion on which her head had rested during that long and weary journey into the hands of the least ferocious-looking of his guards, bidding him deliver it to the count, and tell him that she had been in the carriage which had followed his so closely; that it was her voice which he must have heard at each relay in wailing supplication and lament; and the pillow she now sent to him to rest his head upon was wet with tears shed for him alone. The guard took the pillow, and, with a cruel laugh at so much ingenuity wasted, cut it open before her face, fully expecting to find some important papers, some clue to a conspiracy, within. And Gonfalionieri knew not for years that she had even thought of him once after he had left her side; nor that she had hovered, disguised in a peasant's dress, for months together, round the bleak hill of Spielberg; nor that, by the sacrifice of her fortune, she had at length obtained the promise of his liberty, and then died! What must have been his feelings when he learnt all this! What must have been his love, his gratitude, to her memory! And how did he prove it? you will say. Why, he married again! and has died, the victim of his avarice, at the foot of the Alps, overtaken by the cold, which neither his age nor his feeble health were made to encounter in the cheap conveyance which he had chosen. He has died enormously rich, his property not having been confiscated, but allowed to accumulate during his long imprisonment. He had outlived popularity, and leaves no regret behind; he had suffered his fellow-martyrs to languish in want, nor extended a kindly hand to aid them, in spite of his wealth; so that the utter silence of the partisans of his cause is but just, and conveys a strong impressive moral.'

DWELLINGS OF THE WORKING-CLASSES. On this subject we have on divers occasions spoken. Nothing would afford us greater pleasure than to hear of any rational plan, on fair commercial principles, being set on foot for providing houses of a neat and salubrious kind for the operative classes generally. Schemes have been projected for erecting whole villages out of London for workmen, the conveyance to and from town being at a cheap rate by railway. All such projects are visionary. We want to see no expulsion of working- men's families to what would soon be called Pariah villages. It is our belief that, without building houses at all, but only leasing old properties in town, and arranging them on an economical footing, pretty nearly all good ends would be served.

Among the best schemes yet brought into operation, in regard to erecting new houses, is that at Birkenhead, the rising town opposite Liverpool. Some time ago the Times' presented an account of the visit of Mr Chadwick and other gentlemen to the dwellings erected for the working-classes in this place, from which we gather the following parti

culars:

"Without drawings or plans, it would be difficult to give an accurate conception of the improvements. The buildings are four-storeyed, of red brick, with light sandstone windowsills and copings. Their external aspect would suggest to a Londoner the idea of a block of buildings constructed for professional persons, for an inn or court of Chancery, and, with little addition and variation of ornament, they might match with the new hall of Lincoln's Inn. They

next topic of inquiry. The rents charged were from 3s. 6d. The price at which these objects were attained was the to 5s. each set, according to its position. But this included a constant supply of water, and the use of one gas-burner in each set of rooms, and all rates and taxes, and, moreover, two iron bedsteads, and a grate with an oven, and conve nient fixtures. Some of the inmates admitted that they had paid as high a rent in Liverpool and other towns for no larger apartments of the common inferior construction, but without any of the conveniences and additions. The directors stated that they conceived there would be little value in an example which was not fairly remunerative to the capitalist, and that for this class of town dwellings, considering the trouble and attention they required, a less return than eight per cent. on the outlay would not suffice as an inducement to their construction; and this return they should make. Those who have lived in chambers in London, would admit that they had in the essentials very inferior accommodation for double and treble, and much higher rents. Each set of rooms was perfectly "self-contained," and the arched brick floors gave them advantages in respect to quiet which few sets of chambers possess.

The impression produced by the inspection of these dwellings was evidently one of satisfaction. Mr Chadwick, whilst expressing his warm concurrence as to the advance made, stated his opinion that an additional room was required, and submitted that further improvements might yet be achieved, especially in the mode of warming and ventilation. The ventilation was at present with cold air, which all experiments showed the inmates would in winter try to stop, and succeed in doing so. vitiated air was to some degree dependent on the percepThe egress of tion and care of the inmates. He considered that the ventilation must be self-acting, and that in such a range of buildings it might be accomplished with air that was warm as well as fresh, of which practical instances were in progress. Tubular chimneys of fire-brick, which had been in use in various places, with a much smaller bore, would "draw" better, and, with a careful disposition of fire-brick over the fire-grates, would give greater warmth with less fuel. He pointed to marks of damp on the stairs, opposite