His proposal to add to the treatment of the diseases of joints the apparatus of splints, for ensuring absolute quiescence of the affected surfaces, has saved a most incalculable number of limbs from amputation. It here becomes necessary to repeat a remark we have made in a former work. Sir B. Brodie recommends this plan only in the third edition, I think, of his discriminative work on the joints, not appearing to have been aware that Abernethy taught it for nearly thirty years previously, about ten years of which we ourselves had repeatedly tested its great value, and taught it, but contemporaneously from Abernethy, in our own lectures. Indeed, so important an element is it in the treatment of diseases of the joints, that we have never seen it fail, when fairly applied and accompanied by a reasonable attention to the general health, except in the following cases: First, when the patient has been nearly worn out by disease, before being subjected to treatment; and, secondly, where the complaint has been proved to be accompanied by internal organic disease. We have always thought that one of the most valuable of our obligations to Abernethy was his lesson on fracture of the neck of the thigh bone within the capsule of the joint. For thirty years, Sir Astley Cooper taught, and boasted that he had taught, that this fracture could not unite by bone; Sir Astley reasoning on the anatomy of the part _only_, and conceiving that the neck, in its somewhat isolated position, would be imperfectly nourished; and, seeing that, in point of fact, this fracture _did generally_ unite by ligament only, unfortunately adopted the foregoing idea as the _cause_ of the fact, and concluded that bony union was impracticable. Experiments on animals—at all times extremely fallacious, in this case singularly imperfect in the analogy they afforded—appeared to confirm his views. Despairing of effecting a proper union, he adopted a treatment which rendered it impossible. Abernethy's beautiful reasoning on the subject led him to an opposite conclusion. It embraced certain views of Hunter's, and some common phenomena in other accidents where the union by ligament is _coincident_ with _motion_ of the part. He therefore treated all cases with a view to secure bony union; and he and many of his pupils had no doubt but that they had seen examples of its success. Still, people got well and were lost sight of, and therefore it was said that the fracture was not _wholly_ within the capsule of the joint. At length a specimen was procured from the examination of a dead body, and the question set at rest, we believe, in the minds of every body, that this fracture, though it require especial care to keep parts steady and in apposition, will unite just like other fractures in the way taught (and since proved) by Abernethy. Let those who can calculate the number of surgeons who have been educated by these two gentlemen, and