Trendelenburg is of opinion that it might be possible to remove this clot by direct surgical intervention. After careful consideration of the matter he carried out this operation on a woman aged sixty-three years; he raised an osteoplastic flap on the left side of the thorax, exposed the conus arteriosus, and intended to withdraw the clot, by means of a specially constructed pump, through a slit in its walls. The patient died from excessive bleeding before the clot could be extracted; the operation was hindered by an adherent pericardium. Trendelenburg has carried out this operation on a man forty-five years of age. This patient was tabetic and sustained a spontaneous fracture of the femur. One month later he was seized with urgent dyspnœa and signs clearly indicating the lodgment of an embolus in the pulmonary artery. Trendelenburg exposed the heart, opened the pulmonary artery, and by means of polypus forceps succeeded in withdrawing 34 centimetres of clot. The incision in the artery was carefully closed with sutures. The man improved considerably as the result of the operation, but died thirty-seven hours later. At the post-mortem examination the left and right branches of the pulmonary artery contained an embolus. From the surgical point of view there are no reasons why such a bold example should not be repeated with success. When patients who are profoundly anæmic from menorrhagia due to fibroids undergo hysterectomy, it is a useful measure to give them twenty grains of citrate of sodium twice daily in order to diminish the abnormal tendency of the blood to coagulate in the vessels. Certainly this drug should be administered if there is the least evidence of thrombosis. =Foreign bodies left in the abdomen.= Every writer on ovariotomy and kindred operations insists on the importance of exercising the utmost personal vigilance in counting instruments and dabs before, and immediately after, an abdominal operation in order to avert the dangers which ensue when instruments, dabs, gauze, or drainage tubes are accidentally left in the abdominal cavity. Before the era of antiseptic surgery nearly all the patients in whom foreign bodies were left in the abdominal cavity died. In several instances the surgeon has discovered, on counting the sponges and instruments after the operation, one or more to be missing, and, failing to find them in the room, has reopened the wound and recovered the missing article. In many lucky cases, a sponge or compress has given rise to an abscess, and, the wound reopened, the sponge presented at the opening. Often a compress of cotton-wool or gauze has slowly ulcerated into the rectum and been discharged through the anus.