In tracing the progress of science, it is difficult to assign to each individual his just share of merit. The evidence, always incomplete, seldom allows us to do more than to mark the more fortunate, to whom, as it were, the principal parts have been allotted. The exposition of truth generally implies a previous contest with error. This may, in one sense, be compared with military achievements. We hear of the skill and wisdom of the General and his associate Chiefs; but little is known of individual prowess, on the multiplication of which, after all, the result depends. To one who conferred so many obligations on his country and on mankind as Abernethy, it is difficult to assign only his just share; and yet it is desirable that nothing be ascribed to him which is doubtful or disputable. Antecedently to Abernethy's time, and contemporaneous with the date of Mr. Hunter's labours, surgery had, in the best hands, and as a mere practical _art_, arrived at a respectable position; still, in Abernethy's early day, barber-surgeons were not yet extinct; and, as he jocosely phrased it, he himself had "doffed his cap" to barber-surgeons. There is no doubt that some of them had arrived at a very useful knowledge. The celebrated Ambrose Paré was a French barber-surgeon. When Abernethy entered into life, the best representative of the regular surgery _of that day_ was Mr. Pott, who was contemporary with the period of Mr. Hunter's labours. Mr. Pott was a good surgeon, an eloquent lecturer, a scholar, and a gentleman; and he gave some surgical lectures at St. Bartholomew's Hospital. We have perused two manuscript copies of these lectures, which are in the library of the Royal Medical and Chirurgical Society, and they contain many useful and judicious observations. There are ripples of a more humane and scientific surgery, and many parts that are suggestive of onward study. Pott had also the good sense to perceive the measured pretensions of his own time, and to predict advances on it, as great as that itself was on the surgery of his predecessors: but we do not perceive anything in Pott's lectures in the shape of a science. _Extensive_ generalizations we are not thinking of; we have them _yet_ to get; but we see nothing, in the true sense of the word, even axiomatic. There are no steps, no axioms, by which we can reach the platform of more general propositions. In some of his operations, the most elementary principles are either not perceived or neglected; and, although there are general recognitions of the state of the health influencing the so-called surgical maladies, there is no definite principle developed. It is a recognition scarcely more than that implied in the older surgical writers, when, if the surgical part of a case did not go on well, they recommended the calling in of a physician.