enclosure of one hundred and twelve acres,
formerly a convent garden, to the right beyond
the village. Further on is Vosnes, a hamlet
whose wines are rich in colour and perfect for
perfume, flavour, aroma, and spirit. The
Romanée-Conti is not approached even by the
Romanée-St.-Vivant, the Vivant is only rivalled
by Richebourg, the Richebourg only by La
Tache. This amiable family of wines of the
most liquid ruby, and the most delicious
bouquet, combine the most ethereal lightness
and delicacy with the most royal richness and
fulness of body. They have all a peculiar
vinous pungency.

About a league from Vosnes is the town of
Nuits, with a small piece of ground only six
hectares in extent, which produces the St.
George, so famous for flavour, bouquet, and
delicacy. Close to Aloxe is the vineyard of
Beaune, a well-known and estimable wine,
and not far from there grows the Volnay,
with its light grateful aroma, delicate tint, and
scented flavour of the raspberry. Not far off
is made our old friend the Pomard, with a
deeper colour and more body than Volnay,
and therefore more adapted to keep in warm
climates.

The white Burgundies are unjustly neglected,
for it is agreed by all good judges that they
maintain the highest rank among the white
wines of France, and as one great authority
boldly asserts "are not inferior to the red
either in aroma or flavour." Mont Rachet
stands highest among these for flavour and
perfume. Meursalt, Chablis, Pouilly, Fussy,
Goutte d'or, are also all eminent Burgundians,
but they do not keep so well as the red. The
white wines of the Côte d'Or have their
weaknesses; while the red Burgundies of the first
quality keep for twelve or fifteen years, the
white mature at three or four years old, but are
apt to cloud and thicken as the years roll over
them.

It is a cruel pity that with such natural and
changeless advantages as the Burgundy
vine-growers enjoy, they neglect to make the most
of them. They gather the grape clusters in
the Côte d'Or in a coarse and reckless way.
They tread them before they throw them into
the vat. They let the wine ferment with no
other preparation than removing the stalks.
Finally they gather during the hottest sunshine.

Many of the Burgundy vineyards have grand
traditions. The wine of Beaune, according to
Petrarch, was the chief cause that kept the
Popes so long at Avignon. Beaune was then
thought twice as good as Romanée-Conti.
Chambertin, to the south of Dijon, is a generous
and illustrious wine, of fuller body and
more durability than Romanée. Louis the
Fourteenth is said to have taken it into his
favour, and to have quaffed it in the company
of Colbert and Madame Maintenon, Molière,
and La Vallière. It was also the favourite
draught of Napoleon; with this he cheered
himself after the great cannonades of Austerlitz
and Eylau; but there is a report that a bottle
of rum partly consoled him for the disappointment
of Waterloo.

St. George used to be held the most perfect
of the Burgundies, for every aristocratic quality,
ever after it was prescribed to Louis the
Fourteenth, as a restorative in his illness of 1680.

Bourdeaux for the blood, Burgundy for the
nerves, Dr. Druitt says. A great deal used to
be said of the Vinum Theologicum, or wine
grown in clerical vineyards, but no clerical
vineyards have yet surpassed the best growths
of Burgundy. They are perfectly adapted to
our English use. They want only a moderately
temperate cellar, and a warm room to drink
them in. They won't mix, and therefore they
rather baffle the wicked adulterators.

         PAINLESS OPERATIONS.

IT is little more than twenty years since the
discovery was made by Dr. Wells of Hartford,
America, acting on the suggestion of Sir
Humphry Davy, that nitrous oxide, or laughing
gas, possessed the power of producing temporary
unconsciousness. Two years later the
same powers were found to exist in sulphuric
ether by Dr. Morton, and more recently in
chloroform by Dr. Simpson of Edinburgh. It
would be hard to estimate how greatly these
discoveries have affected the art of operative
surgery; and not that branch alone, but the
whole of medical science, and how inestimable
a boon they have conferred on suffering humanity.
In the days when such eminent surgeons
as Sir Astley Cooper and Mr. Liston were in
their acme of fame, and whilst anæsthetics
were unknown, the field of operative surgery
was much restricted. Operations usually were
avoided if they could not be performed with
great rapidity, for there was danger from the
restlessness and severe distress of the patient.
At the present time not only is the surgeon with
such anæsthetics as chloroform, sulphuric ether,
&c., at his command able to reduce the worst
cases of dislocation and fracture with a certain
degree of ease, or to accomplish, without
inflicting pain, the tedious dissection, which
is to relieve a sufferer; but he can undertake
with comparative safety many operations never
thought of in former times. The effect of such
anæsthetics upon the body when they are
inhaled, is, firstly, to render it unconscious of
pain; secondly, to relax the voluntary muscles,
and to paralyse the nerves of sensation, by
inducing a state of the brain like intoxication.
Long before the important discoveries
regarding the properties of nitrous oxide,
made by Sir Humphry Davy, it was thought
that there must exist somewhere in nature, a
means of so paralysing the nerves of sensation,
that some of the slight surgical operations
could be performed without causing pain to the
patient. Nothing, however, appears to have
been established in proof of such a theory,
until the experiments made by Sir Humphry
Davy towards the end of the last century,