the patient’s constitution might accommodate itself to the injury; while more extended observation has demonstrated that such secondary amputations are more fatal than those which are performed shortly after the infliction of the wounds leading to them—the advantage of the patient thus coinciding with what must very constantly happen to be a practice of necessity in the field. Mr. Guthrie remarks, in his Commentaries on the Surgery of the Peninsular War, between 1808 and 1815, that the surgical principles and the practice which prevailed at the commencement of the war were superseded on almost all important points at its conclusion; and he quotes a remark of Sir Astley Cooper to the effect that the art of surgery received from the practical experience of that war an impulse and improvement unknown to it before. The still more recent military operations in Algeria, in Sleswick–Holstein, in the Crimea, and in India have afforded the opportunity of testing practically the applicability to army practice of some of the great improvements which have been accomplished in the civil practice of surgery in Europe since the termination of the war in 1815. Among these may be particularly enumerated the avoidance of amputation of limbs by recourse to excision of joints; resections of injured portions of the shafts of long bones; mitigated amputations, by removal only of those terminal portions of the extremities which had been destroyed by the original injury; and the practice generally of what has been styled conservative surgery. In these wars, too, the value of chloroform as an anesthetic agent in military surgery has been fully established. They have also especially illustrated the influence of various states of health and climates on the results of gunshot wounds. All the anticipations which were held out at the commencement of some of these campaigns have not been realized, but still they have added much valuable information and many improvements to military surgery.