One might write pages on the influence of the Rope on human progress; but for our purpose we may simply say that probably Mr. Pepys was kept quiet with many yards of hemp. Those who cut for the stone were specialists, doing nothing else; their arrival at a patient’s house must have resembled an invasion, with their vast armamentarium and crowds of assistants. By Pepys’s time Marianus Sanctus had lived--yes, so greatly was he venerated that they called him “Sanctus,” the Holy Man; Saint Marianus if you will. He it was, in Italy in 1524, who invented the apparatus major, which made the operation a little less barbarous than that of the Greeks. This God-sent apparatus consisted mainly of a grooved staff to be shoved into the bladder and a series of forceps. You cut on to the staff as the first step of the operation; it was believed that if you cut in the middle line in the raphe the wound would never heal, owing to the callosity of the part; moreover, if you carried your incision too far back you would cause fatal hæmorrhage from the inferior hæmorrhoidal veins. Having, then, made your incision well to the right or left, you exposed the urethra, made a good big hole in that pipe, and inserted a fine able pair of tongs, with which you seized hold of the stone and crushed it if you could, pulling it out in bits; or if the stone were hard, and you had preternaturally long fingers, you might even get it out on a finger-tip. It was always considered the mark of a wise surgeon to carry a spare stone with him in his waistcoat pocket, so that the patient might at least have a product of the chase to see if the surgeon should find his normal efforts unrewarded. Diagnosis was little more advanced in those days than operative surgery; there are numbers of conditions which may have caused symptoms like those of a stone, and it was always well for the surgeon to be prepared.