Occasionally, moreover, after dinner, when the ladies have left the table, and the men alone remain to empty decanters and derange a dessert, one has the gratification of meeting some very young gentleman, who, the week before last, presented his proud father with the diploma of “the college,” elegantly framed and glazed, in return for an education which has cost five years and a thousand pounds, and who astonishes his elderly associates with a highly-tinted sketch of some operative achievement, in which perchance he assisted at the hospital. As he surveys the auditory, silent and absorbed by his heart-stirring description, and complacently witnesses the admiration which such evidence of his own familiarity with harrowing scenes, and of his apparent absence of emotion, elicits, it is to be feared that its influence, associated with that of the port, a beverage appreciated by our young friend, if one may judge by the quantity he imbibes, tends to render the information obtained, as one may say almost at first hand, not so absolutely trustworthy as a man of fact is accustomed to desire. After a due survey then of the varied sources from which most people obtain information respecting the topics in question, and after some observation of the character and quality of the knowledge so acquired, we have formed the deliberate conclusion that they possess very erroneous, and very inadequate notions about the nature of a surgical operation. No doubt all admire the _sang-froid_ and skill, possession of which is necessary to make a good surgical operator—qualities, by the way, which are perhaps more frequently developed by training, than found already existing as a natural inheritance. But it is germane to our purpose to remember that everybody has a direct practical concern in the existence of an available supply of the necessary talent to meet a certain demand on the part of the body politic, for no one knows how soon his own personal necessities may not be such as to give him the strongest possible interest in its exercise: a demand that is absolutely inevitable;—for be assured that, without any wish to alarm you, gentle reader, Mr Neison will, if requested to make the calculation, inform us at once what the numerical chances are that your own well-proportioned nether limb will, or will not, fall before the surgeon’s knife, or that that undoubtedly hard and well-developed cranium may not yet be scientifically explored by “trepan” or “trephine.” He will estimate with unerring certainty the probability (to nine places of decimals, if you demand it) that your own fair person may become the subject of some unpleasing excrescence; and also what the chances are that you must seek the surgeon’s aid to remove it. While Mr. Buckle will stoutly maintain, and you will find it hard to gainsay him, that, given the present conditions of existence, a certain ascertainable number of tumours, broken legs, and natural-born deformities will regularly make their