medical witnesses. He throughout this inquiry showed himself an excellent and logical cross-examiner. Among the medical witnesses called were Dr. Burdon-Sanderson, who made an exhaustive report describing his experiments; Dr. Marcet, Dr. John Syer Bristowe, and Dr. Lionel Beale, who conducted the microscopical part of the inquiry. It is not surprising that after hearing the evidence adduced during the long sitting of this commission Dr. Quain should have sided with the section which desired the extermination of the plague 'at any price.' This was the view of the majority, but throughout the country there was an opinion, founded on insufficient data, that too high a price might be paid even for the stamping out of this fearful disease. This section of public opinion found its spokesmen on the commission in the persons of Earl Spencer, Lord Cranbourne (Salisbury), Mr. Clare Sewell Read, and Dr. Bence Jones. The majority included Mr. Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke), Dr. Lyon Playfair, Dr. Richard Quain, and Dr. Edmund Parkes. Dr. Quain's work on this commission very thoroughly justified his appointment, and his letters to the Times and articles in the Saturday Review went far indeed to change public opinion on the whole matter. The voice of the public at large was at first very strongly raised against the stamping-out recommendations of this commission. These recommendations, as Dr. Quain ably pointed out, would ultimately save many millions of pounds to the country, and the event has proved the correctness of his views. In the conduct of the Royal Commission of Inquiry perhaps the most essential detail is the arrangement of the method and scheme of the investigation. For this portion of t]ie work of this most successful inquiry Richard Quain was in great measure responsible. In the third report of this commission there were a number of valuable drawings illustrating the pathology of the disease, and these were, at the instance of Quain, presented to the Royal College of Physicians of London."
Quain's first important essay in medical science, and the one on which the foundation of his reputation was laid, was his essay—"brilliant research," Nature calls it—on Fatty Degeneration of the Heart, which was contributed to the Transactions of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society for 1850, and appeared afterward in an expanded and exhaustive article in his Dictionary of Medicine. "Simple as the doctrine appears to us at the present day," says Nature, "fifty years ago it was a startling pronouncement by a young man fresh from his medical studies that fat may be and often is a product of the decomposition of muscular tissue, and that this change goes on in the living body. The ideas of life, nutrition, and death were greatly influenced by the doctrine. This, let us remember, was many years before Bauer and Voit, working with phosphorus
