the middle of the century, in his seventy-seventh year. Haller says of him, "Ingenio vir valuit, deinde usit.”
That he was a man of great natural endowments, of quick and penetrating genius, as well as mature observation, his papers read before the Academies of Sciences and of Surgery abundantly prove. His Treatise on the Diseases of the Bones, which was among his earliest labours, still retains the character of a standard authority, especially as regards fractures and morbid changes, and discovers a grand design in its conception as well as talent in its performance.
His was the first account of the mollities ossium. Petit’s screw tourniquet was no unimportant contribution to operative surgery, and beyond a doubt has saved many lives. His papers on the division of the frenum lingue in infants, on the ruptured tendoachillis, on the fistula lacrymalis, and on various practical subjects and details, discover the simple and profound views peculiar to a master-mind; but most especially his memoirs, illustrated by experiment, on the means employed by nature for the suppression of hemorrhage, and on aneurism,—subjects on which our countrymen have since enlightened the world.
The glory of the revival of surgery was not however exclusively due to the French nation; we cannot overlook the Dutch school and the just claims of Laurence Heister, a contemporary of Petit, the pupil of Ruysch and Rau of Amsterdam, and subse-
