I know no situation more wretched or more pitiable than this. Here, even at the best, the most exquisite torture is inflicted: the poor trembling patient, abstracted from every other earthly object, and with the most exquisite feelings concentrated on the present, awaits, in awful suspence, the impending stroke which is to divide the skin, that seat of accumulated sensibility, and deliver him from wretchedness; but the hope is vain, his torments are again and again renewed; he perceives that his life is the sport of a fool; he writhes in agony, or sinks in deliquium; and the issue is, as might be expected, too generally, even at the best, unsuccessful. When all this is not the case, how often does the operator, on the contrary ignorant and rash, plunge his knife into some vital organ of the patient, and at once terminate his life and his diseases? That this picture is not too highly coloured, I solemnly appeal to the conscience and the feelings even of the best operators, who are too candid to deny that melancholy reflection has often oppressed them from the fate of patients—martyrs to their want of precision. * * * * * To obviate this train of miseries; to give ease and satisfaction to the operator, by conferring precision and success upon his operation, and to rescue from death, or rather from torture and agony, innumerable sufferers, are the results which I confidently expect from the adoption of the following method. Nor can I say more in proof of its importance. I doubt not, that it will, ultimately, constitute the basis and direct the genius of surgery. * * * * * There exists no other method of effecting this, than by the enunciation of the following principle; namely, that there is, especially in such parts as are not liable to be deranged by voluntary motion, an invariable relation between the arrangements of internal and the situation of external parts, which may justly be considered as accurate signs of them; in consequence of which, by adopting, on each side of the nerve, artery or other subject of operation, a fixed point, or one rendered fixed by particular positions of the body; and by dividing, according to a line or rule, the space between these fixed points into a given number of proportional parts, _i. s._ parts, not equally large in all subjects, but uniformly of the same size, with relation to the whole which they compose, and generally differing in the male and female—by these means, I say, the situation of any given subject of operation, in any given part of the body, may be most accurately indicated, as being undeviatingly a certain number of proportional parts distant from the one, and a certain number from the other of these points.