In amputation at the hip-joint, the femoral and profunda arteries are frequently divided at or just below the origin of the latter, and bleed furiously if disregarded; but the slightest compression between the finger and thumb stops both at once. They never have given me the smallest concern in these operations, or others of a similar nature; and surgeons should learn to hold all arteries that can be taken between the finger and thumb in great contempt. It is quite impossible for a man to be a good surgeon--to do his patient justice in great and difficult operations attended by hemorrhage, unless he has this feeling--unless his mind is fully satisfied of the truth of these observations. While his attention ought to be directed to other important circumstances, it is perhaps absorbed by the dread of bleeding, by the idle fear that he will not be able to compress the artery and restrain the bleeding from it--that he may have half a dozen vessels bleeding at once--that his patient will die on the table before him. Once fairly in dismay, and the patient is really in danger; but, endowed with that confidence which is only to be acquired through precept supported by experience, he surveys the scene with perfect calmness: taking the great artery between the finger and thumb of one hand, he places the points of all the other fingers, of both hands if necessary, on the next largest vessels; or he presses the flaps or sides of the wound together until his other hand can be set at liberty by an assistant, or in consequence of a ligature having been passed around the principal artery. This is a scene sufficient to try the presence of mind of any man; but he is not a good surgeon who is not equal to it--who does not delight in the recollection of it when his patient is in safety, and his recovery assured. It was in consequence of what was then considered the too great boldness of the practice that my old friend, Sir Charles Bell, whose loss to science cannot be too much regretted, represented me seated on a pack saddle on the back of a bourro, (_Anglice_, a jack-ass,) on the top of the Pyrenees, expatiating on their merits (which he did not believe) to the descendants of the Bearnois of Henri Quatre on one side, and to the children of the lieges of Ferdinand and Isabella on the other; but no one now disputes their accuracy. The surgery of the Peninsular war was many years in advance of the surgery of civil life.