To show how important gentleness is—a surgeon had a puzzling case of injury to the elbow. He believed that he knew the nature of the accident, and that he had put the parts right; but still the joint remained in a half-straight position; and the surgeon, who knew his business, became alarmed, lest something had escaped him, and that the joint would be stiff. He proposed a consultation. The joint was examined with great gentleness, and after Abernethy's plan. The boy experienced no pain. Everything appeared in its natural position. The surgeon said: "Now, my boy, bend your arm a little, but no farther than just to reach my finger; and not as much as that, if it gives you any pain." This the boy did very gently. After waiting a few minutes, the surgeon again told him to bend it a little more, and upon the same conditions; and so on, until, in a very short space of time—perhaps eight or ten minutes—the arm had been completely bent. The boy had been alarmed, and the muscles had become so sensitive that they held the parts with the most painful tenacity; but, beyond this, there was nothing the matter. We cannot help thinking that Abernethy's benevolence had a great influence in directing some of his happiest contributions to practice. We consider that every sufferer with that serious accident, fracture of the neck of the thigh bone within the joint, owes a great portion of any recovery he may have, to Abernethy. It was he who was the real means of overthrowing a dangerous dogma, that such cases could not unite by bone, and who opposed the practice consequent on it, by which reparation by bone became impossible. There was hardly any subject which he touched, of which he did not take some view more or less original; and his reasoning was always particularly simple and to the point. No man, we believe, ever exceeded him in the skill he possessed in conveying ideas from one mind into another; but he did a great deal more: those who really studied him were sent away thinking, and led to work with a kind of pleasure, which was in some sense distinct from any merely practical or professional interest. He contrived to imbue you with the love of philosophical research in the abstract—with an interest in truth for its own sake; you found yourself remembering the bare facts, not so much from conscious _efforts_ of memory, as from the suggestive interest of the observations with which they were so frequently associated. In going over one of his Lectures alone, they seem to grow and expand under your own reflections. We know not how to express the effect they produced: they seemed to give new pleasure on repetition, to purify your thoughts scarcely less than they animated your onward studies.