er of ills is at his best an exotic tree which, when rooted in
its native orient, throve and flourished and was abundant in balm
but, transplanted to a clime more temperate, its roots have lost their
quondam vigour while the stuff that comes away from it is stagnant, acid
and inoperative.

The news was imparted with a circumspection recalling the ceremonial
usage of the Sublime Porte by the second female infirmarian to the
junior medical officer in residence, who in his turn announced to the
delegation that an heir had been born, When he had betaken himself
to the women's apartment to assist at the prescribed ceremony of the
afterbirth in the presence of the secretary of state for domestic
affairs and the members of the privy council, silent in unanimous
exhaustion and approbation the delegates, chafing under the length and
solemnity of their vigil and hoping that the joyful occurrence would
palliate a licence which the simultaneous absence of abigail and
obstetrician rendered the easier, broke out at once into a strife of
tongues. In vain the voice of Mr Canvasser Bloom was heard endeavouring
to urge, to mollify, to refrain. The moment was too propitious for the
display of that discursiveness which seemed the only bond of union among
tempers so divergent. Every phase of the situation was successively
eviscerated: the prenatal repugnance of uterine brothers, the Caesarean
section, posthumity with respect to the father and, that rarer form,
with respect to the mother, the fratricidal case known as the Childs
Murder and rendered memorable by the impassioned plea of Mr Advocate
Bushe which secured the acquittal of the wrongfully accused, the
rights of primogeniture and king's bounty touching twins and triplets,
miscarriages and infanticides, simulated or dissimulated, the acardiac
_foetus in foetu_ and aprosopia due to a congestion, the agnathia
of certain chinless Chinamen (cited by Mr Candidate Mulligan) in
consequence of defective reunion of the maxillary knobs along the medial
line so that (as he said) one ear could hear what the other spoke, the
benefits of anesthesia or twilight sleep, the prolongation of labour
pains in advanced gravidancy by reason of pressure on the vein, the
premature relentment of the amniotic fluid (as exemplified in the
actual case) with consequent peril of sepsis to the matrix, artificial
insemination by means of syringes, involution of the womb consequent
upon the menopause, the problem of t