SPEIR, Samuel Fleet, surgeon, born in Brooklyn, New York, 9 April, 1838. He was educated at the Brooklyn polytechnic institute and at the medical department of the University of the city of New York, where he was graduated in 1860, with three prizes. He also received the prize essay gold medal from the American medical association in 1864. After spending two years in study abroad, chiefly in Paris, he settled in his native city, where he still (1888) practises his profession. Dr. Speir has been connected with various hospitals and dispensaries, and during the civil war served under the United States sanitary commission, He has contributed to professional literature and is the inventor of a new method of arresting surgical haemorrhage by artery-constriction, for which he received a prize from the State medical society in 1871, and of a new method for the differential diagnosis of morbid growths, based on the examination of minute specimens.