t legs cannot remain stationary while
the march of improvement goes on around them, and they, too, have moved
onward with the stride of progress.

A boy of ten years old, living in a New-Hampshire village, had one of
his legs crushed so as to require amputation. The little fellow was
furnished with a "Peg" and stumped round upon it for ten years. We can
imagine what he suffered as he grew into adolescence under the cross of
this unsightly appendage. He was of comely aspect, tall, well-shaped,
with well-marked, regular features. But just at the period when personal
graces are most valued, when a good presence is a blank check on the
Bank of Fortune, with Nature's signature at the bottom, he found himself
made hideous by this fearful-looking counterfeit of a limb. It announced
him at the threshold he reached with beating heart by a thump more
energetic than the palpitation in his breast. It identified him as far
as the eye of jealousy could see his moving figure. The "peg" became
intolerable, and he unstrapped it and threw himself on the tender
mercies of the crutch.

But the crutch is at best an instrument of torture. It presses upon a
great bundle of nerves; it distorts the figure; it stamps a character of
its own upon the whole organism; it is even accused of distempering the
mind itself.

This young man, whose name was "B. FRANK. PALMER," (the abbreviations
probably implying the name of a distinguished Boston philosopher of the
last century, whose visit to Philadelphia is still remembered in that
city,) set himself at work to contrive a limb which should take
the place of the one he had lost, fulfilling its functions and
counterfeiting its aspect so far as possible. The result was the "Palmer
leg," one of the most unquestionable triumphs of American ingenuity. Its
victorious march has been unimpeded by any serious obstacle since it
first stepped into public notice. The inventor was introduced by the
late Dr. John C. Warren, in 1846, to the Massachusetts General Hospital,
which institution he has for many years supplied with his artificial
limbs. He received medals from the American Institute, the Massachusetts
Charitable Association, and the Great Exhibition in New York, and
obtained an honorary mention from the Royal Commissioners of the World's
Exhibition in London,--being the only maker of legs so distinguished.
These are only a few of fifty honorary awards he has received at various
times. The famous surgeons o