Very many cases of idiocy are constantly brought to surgeons in the hope that something can be done for these lamentable children. Unfortunately, at present surgery holds out but little hope in such cases. In a few exceptional instances it may be best to operate, but a prudent surgeon will decline to do any operation in the vast majority of cases. _Surgery of the Chest and Heart._—The chest is the region of the body which has shown the least progress of all, and yet even here the progress is very marked. When, as a result of pleurisy, fluid accumulates on one side of the chest, even displacing the heart, we now do not hesitate to remove an inch or two of one or more ribs and thoroughly drain the cavity, with not only a reasonable, but in a majority of cases, one may almost say, a certain, prospect of cure. We have also entered upon the road which will lead us in time to a secure surgery of the lung itself. A few cases of abscess, of serious gun-shot wound, attended by otherwise fatal hemorrhage, and even of tubercular cavities in the lungs have been successfully dealt with, but the twentieth century will see, I have no doubt, brilliant results in thoracic surgery. One of the most striking injuries of the chest has recently assumed a new importance, viz., wounds of the heart itself. In several instances an opening has been made in the bony and muscular walls of the chest, and a wound of the heart itself has been sewed up. The number is as yet small, but there have been several recoveries, which lead us to believe that here, too, the limits of surgery have by no means been reached. _Surgery of the Abdomen._—Of the abdomen and the pelvis a very different story can be told. These cavities might almost be called the playground of the surgeon, and the remarkable results which have been obtained warrant us in believing that even greater results are in store for us in the future. In the earlier part of this article I spoke of the advantages of the study of the pathological anatomy or the diseased condition of individual organs. Perhaps no better illustration of the value of this can be given than in the studies of appendicitis. This operation has been one of the contributions to the surgery of the world in which America has been foremost. While there were one or two earlier papers, Willard Parker, of New York, in 1867, first made the profession listen to him when he urged that abscesses appearing above the right groin should be operated on and the patient’s life saved. But it was not until Fitz, of Boston, in 1888, published his paper, in which he pointed out, as a result of a study of a series of post-mortem examinations of persons dying from such an abscess above the right groin, that the appendix was the seat of the trouble, that this so frequent disease was rightly understood and rightly treated.