Complete Absence of Rectum. Colotomy

S-, a male child, four clays' old, was brought from a village to the Colvin Hospital, Allahabad, at about 6 o'clock on the evening of the 31st March, 1884. The hospital dhai came to me and reported that a baby had arrived in whom the natural passage of defecation was absent. I immediately went over to the hospital and saw it. The face was pinched ; the baby could cry only faintly, the breathing was difficult, the abdomen was very much distended and tympanitic, and the veins on its surface were distinctly marked out. At the perinceum, the skin, at the spot where the