CARDEN'S AMPUTATION AT THE CONDYLES OF THE FEMUR.[46]--The operation consists in reflecting a rounded or semi-oval flap of skin and fat from the front of the knee-joint, dividing everything else straight down to the bone, and sawing the bone slightly above the plane of the muscles, thus forming a flat-faced stump, with a bonnet of integument to fall over it. The operator standing on the right side of the limb, seizes it between his left forefinger and thumb at the spot selected for the base of the flap, and enters (Plate II. fig. 8) the point of the knife close to his finger, bringing it round through skin and fat below the patella to the spot pressed by his thumb; then turning the edge downwards at a right angle with the line of the limb, he passes it through to the spot where it first entered, cutting outwards through everything behind the bone (Plate IV. fig. 16). The flap is then reflected, and the remainder of the soft parts divided straight down to the bone; the muscles are then slightly cleared upwards, and I saw it applied. I have ventured to make a slight change in the method of performing this most excellent operation, for having found the posterior flap, as cut in the method above described, rather scanty in the earlier cases in which I have had occasion to perform it, after dissecting back the anterior flap and cutting into the knee-joint, I shape a slightly convex posterior flap of skin only, at least one and a half inches in length in adult, and allow it to retract before dividing the muscles by a circular cut to the bone, and have had every reason to be satisfied with the change. AMPUTATION OF THE THIGH.--Amputation of the thigh has been the favourite battle-ground where flap and circular, antero-posterior and lateral, long and short flaps, double, triple, and conical incisions, have striven with each other; so were I to attempt to describe one quarter of the various methods employed, I should need to rewrite the history of Amputation. It will suffice merely to describe the _best_ modes of amputating the thigh through its lower, middle, and upper thirds respectively, and at the hip-joint. In one word, it may be stated that, with the exception of those amputations performed through the lower third of the bone, the flap method is to be preferred, and the flaps should in almost every case be made by transfixion.