amples of attempts made to depreciate his practice, in which the application was delayed for a number of days instead of being used instantly, as he insists it should have been.

In army practice, where soldiers are to be transported, and in civil life also, under such circumstances, Seutin's method will be in every point of view justified.

As for ourselves, we admire the simplicity, the everything surgical, in the admirable dressings of the modern father of military surgery, Baron Larrey.

His flat and cylindrical cushions of rolled-up straw sewed in common linen cloth, composed thus of materials accessible on all occasions, and which are placed longitudinally next to the limb and beneath the splints, forming with the latter an open framework around it, have an advantage over all other dressings, by their elasticity, coolness, and cleanliness, and at the same time giving an opportunity for the limb to be daily examined.

This simple and cheap apparatus is, in fact, an imitation of Nature herself in the adjustment of the action of the long muscles, by which their antagonist powers, in an unfractured healthy limb, exert, like so many levers, a proper equipoise of extension and flexion in preserving the bones in a correct position upon their hinges or joints.*

It is due to my friend Dr. P. S. Townsend, of this city, to say, that this apparatus of Baron Larrey was first introduced into this country at the hospital of the Seamen's Retreat on Staten Island, in the vicinity of this city, about the year 1831-2. This charity was founded chiefly through the instrumentality of Dr. Townsend.

JOURNEYING on through many cities of less importance in Belgium and in Holland, we alighted at ancient Leyden. At the name of Leyden, every historic association dear to our profession is summoned before us. It was here, in this great school of learning, that lived the immortal Boerhaave, and a galaxy of so many great names in every department of science; giving a metropolitan renown to this otherwise inconsiderable though beautiful city.

We visited the lecture-rooms, the hospitals, the museums, which were once walked and occupied by Boerhaave. His humble dwelling, a rural villa, is yet to be seen in the environs of the town. In the Botanic Garden, attached to the now very small School of Medicine, they take great pride in showing a tree which was planted and nursed by the great champion of the Humoral Pathology. From this tree we took and preserved a leaf with great care, as a souvenir of the spot hallowed by the footsteps and consecrated by the fame of that master-mind in medicine, whose name is not more illustrious by his profound learning and extensive reputation as a professor and a physician, than it is by his exemplary virtues as a man and a Christian.

But Leyden was—and is no more. Its spirit departed with him who gave it life. It now stands like a city of the dead, deserted, alone, scarce a voice heard within its walls-the rank grass growing in its streets-the scum of the green conferva gathering on the surface of its stagnant canals, whose waters are never ruffled or

disturbed, save by some solitary bird gliding through them and leaving its track behind.

There was an awful solemnity and a sepulchral feeling in passing through the streets of this far-famed town, once thronged and alive with its thousands of medical students from all quarters of the world, attracted by the fame and talents of its ruling star and master-spirit. Scarcely could we imagine to ourselves that such things had been, and were gone as though they never were.

Salernum in Calabria, and Leyden in Holland, were successively the two great fountains of medical instruction on the Continent of Europe. Not a vestige of the former, when we visited it, was to be found. All its professors and their edifices had crumbled alike in the dust; and Leyden, its successor, is fast passing to the same tomb. The schools of Edinburgh and of Paris have risen upon their ruins. And may we not anticipate, with fearful forebodings, that these, too, are destined, like all mortal things, to decay, and that another Leyden may arise in this western world that shall unite the fame of them all; and that, in their turn, the pupils of the Old World shall come to seek instruction in the New.

America, for what she is indebted to the father-land, may then have it in her power to make restitution fourfold to her ancient benefactors.

I passed through the old cities of Harlem, of Amsterdam, and Utrecht; familiar and endeared names, that vividly recalled my own native state during the sway of the ancient burgomasters of the province of New-Netherland, now the "Empire State of New-York."

In the two latter cities there are extensive hospitals and schools of medicine, but nothing remarkable of a distinctive character.

PRUSSIA.

FROM Utrecht I proceeded en route to the town of Hallé, in Prussia, rendered famous by the name of the three Meckels, whose labours and publications in anatomy must ever be the admiration of all students and practitioners.

The third and last of the name, and the greatest, had paid the debt of nature a few days before my arrival. From the vastness of his researches in anatomy, as shown in his published volumes, I anticipated a rich treat in the examination of the Meckel Museum. In this I was not disappointed; for, in extent and variety of human and comparative specimens, it is only surpassed by that stupendous monument of anatomical labour, the Hunterian Museum of London, which was the work of one individual only, and must ever stand as an example of untiring and prolonged investigation that has no parallel, and is calculated to humble our pride and make us feel our own insignificance.*

The private museum of the Meckels, though the labour of only three persons, far exceeds in extent any national museum on the Continent of Europe. And it is a matter of surprising wonder how so small and insignificant a town as Hallé, containing only a few thousand inhabitants, and remotely situated in the interior of Prussia, could have ever furnished the materiel for such a collection; or how a medical school, whose anatomical

*have in my possession two lancets that belonged to Mr. Hunter. They were presented to me by the conservator of the Royal College of Surgeons, London, and are in fine preservation.

theatre can scarce accommodate fifty pupils, could have supported the founders or enabled them to complete so vast a work.

I examined with great interest every compartment of this remarkable establishment. There were specimens there of immense beauty and infinite variety, in anatomy, comparative anatomy, and pathology, and in zoology in general, all tributary to the illustration of physiology and the cure of diseases.

When about to leave I was offered to select a souvenir, and contented myself with a single Clavicle, which I prize highly, as having belonged to such distinguished anatomists as those who founded this museum.

Perhaps my affection for so small a part of the human fabric, might have made my friends at Hallé consider me particularly moderate; but I had a reason which my American countrymen will pardon me for having wished to gratify. It was that I might have in this memorial of the labour of the illustrious Meckels that bone, so small, yet so important in the human body, and frightful in some of its diseases, which I conceived to have myself given-I hope I may say without vanity-still more consideration to, by exsecting it through its entire extent for a tremendous Osteo-sarcoma. I attached more value to this operation from its novelty and originality, and from its never having been performed before; and, let me add, from my deeming it, from the character of the vessels and parts involved in its steps, the most important, difficult, and dangerous operation that can be performed on the human body. The patient who was the subject of it still lives, as a monument of the benefit of modern surgery. It has only been performed successfully on one occasion since. I have ventured to call it my Waterloo operation, as it was performed on the seventeenth day of June, [1827.]