parts of his estate not seized by the gold-diggers; until, little by little, his magnificent property melted away, and he is now, at the age of sixty-four, all but destitute. For one item he has paid, during the last ten years, in counsel fees and legal expenses, one hundred and twenty-five thousand dollars.

As for poor Marshall (who claims to be a great grandson of a signer of the Declaration of Independence), he was one of the unsuccessful diggers. He was reduced to extreme poverty. Two or three years ago, however, he obtained a warrant for a tract of land in California, to which his services in the Mexican war entitled him, and upon which he began the culture of grapes. In this business he has had some success, and his prospects are fair for a secure and honorable old age. His little farm is situated not far from the spot where, nineteen years ago, he ruined himself by discovering a gold mine.

VALENTINE MOTT.

ON that Saturday morning, when the news of the assassination of President Lincoln struck horror and dismay to the minds of the people of New York, Dr. Valentine Mott, the most eminent surgeon America has produced, was seated in his dressingroom under the hands of his barber. He had reached the age of eighty years, but was still hale and vigorous. Though retired from practice, he was occasionally induced to perform an operation, and his hand appeared to have lost little of its steadiness or skill. Four times during the last winter he had operated for rigidity of the lower jaw; he had used the knife that very week, and was under an engagement to remove an enlarged cancer of the breast. The doctor was an unusually handsome old gentleman, of erect and finely developed frame, his countenance well defined and healthy-looking, and his hair as white as snow. As he appeared in the streets, clad in his suit of spotless black, his linen as snowy as his hair, he looked the very picture of that character which is so much admired, "a gentleman of the old school."

It has been a custom with barbers, from time immemorial, to discourse with their patrons of the news of the day. The barber of Dr. Mott at once began to speak of the awful news of that morning. The doctor, who had heard nothing of it, was overwhelmed with the intelligence. He turned as pale as death. Rising from his chair, he staggered to an adjoining room in search of his wife. "My dear," said he, "I have received such a shock, President Lincoln has been murdered." Having uttered these words, he sat down, still deadly pale, and so feeble that he could scarcely keep his seat. He was soon seized with acute pains in the back, and appeared to be overtaken,

all at once, with the weakness usually attached to fourscore. From that time, he continued to grow feebler every hour, and, after lingering ten days, breathed his last, a victim of the same blow that robbed the nation of its chief.

Dr. Mott was born at Glen Cove, on Long Island, in 1785, only fifteen months after the final ratification of the treaty which acknowledged the independence of the United States; so that he was almost as old as the nation. His father, Henry Mott, was also a physician, an old New York practitioner, who died at the age of eighty-three. After the usual course of medical study at Columbia College, he obtained his degree in his twentyfirst year, and sailed for Europe to continue his studies. At that time, owing to the severity of the laws against body-snatching, and the intense hostility of the people to the dissection of the dead, it was impossible in New York to procure the requisite means of studying the human frame. Bodies were occasionally obtained from the prisons and almshouses, but even these were granted reluctantly, and, at that day, they were very few in number. Hence the necessity which compelled a young man, ambitious to rise high in his profession, to repair to the medical schools of Paris, London, and Edinburgh.

Dr. Mott spent three years abroad, and faithfully improved his time. A surgeon, however, like a poet, is born, not made. That firmness and dexterity of hand, that boldness and resolution, that perfect eyesight, that strength of muscle, that calmness of nerve, and power of enduring a long drain upon the vitality, which are requisite in great surgical operations, are nature's own gift. Study may make a man a physician, but no man can be a great surgeon unless he is born for that vocation. In the hospitals of Europe, while still little more than a youth, Dr. Mott gave evidence of possessing the surgeon's peculiar organization. He performed several leading operations with so much success, that he returned home famous, and was at once appointed Professor of Surgery in Columbia College. From that time to the day of his death, a period of fifty-six years, he was a Professor of Surgery in New York. He was the first teacher of his art in this country to deliver bedside lectures to students,

a method extremely disagreeable to the patient whose dis

eased body furnishes the subject of the lecture, but highly beneficial to the students.

He used to tell a story of the desperate risks that had to be incurred, fifty years ago, in getting bodies for dissection. To be merely found in possession of a human limb subjected a student to a long term of imprisonment; and such was the fury of the people against dissection, that, if a man escaped the severity of the law, he would be likely to incur a worse fate at the hands of a mob. Nevertheless, one dark night, in 1815, Dr. Mott and a number of his students braved all the terrors of the law and of the mob in their efforts to procure a winter's supply of "subjects." Dressed in the coarse and well-worn clothes of a laborer, he mounted a cart, and drove alone to a burying-ground some distance out of town. A band of students had been at work within the enclosure, and, by the time the cart arived, they were ready with the load designed for it. Eleven bodies were quickly placed in the cart, and covered over in such a way as to lead passers-by to suppose that it was loaded with country produce. That done, the young men vanished into the night, leaving their professor to drive his cart to the college in Barclay street. In the dead of night he drove down Broadway, and reached the college unchallenged, where the band of students were ready to receive him. The load was promptly transferred to the dissecting-room, and the cart returned to its owner.

To a late period of his life he was accustomed, before performing an important operation, to experiment upon the dead body.

A

A story is told of his readiness in the lecture-room. mother brought into the amphitheatre, one morning, an extremely dirty, sickly, miserable-looking child, for the purpose of having a tumor removed. He exhibited the tumor to the class, but informed the mother that he could not operate upon the child without the consent of her husband. One of the students, in his eagerness to examine the tumor, jumped over into the little enclosure designed for the operator and his patients. Dr. Mott, observing this intrusion, turned to the student, and asked him, with the most innocent expression of countenance:

"Are you the father of this child?" Thunders of applause and laughter greeted this ingenious rebuke, during which the intruder returned to his place crestfallen.

His coolness in the very crisis of an operation was very re markable. If he had occasion for another instrument, he never took it without a courteous bow and word to the assistant who handed it to him. There was never the slightest appearance of haste, tremor, anxiety, or excitement. He went calmly on, from the first incision to the last ligature, his touch always sure, and his judgment clear. He cut firmly and boldly, yet with a certain gentleness, too, that reduced the patient's sufferings to the minimum, and greatly facilitated the healing of the wounds. There was no chloroform, it must be remembered, during the first forty years of his practice, to keep the patient still and unconscious under the knife. The surgeon had to endure at every moment the consciousness that he was inflicting agony, and hear the shrieks of the sufferer lying bound upon the table, or held by strong men in the chair.

The first honors of surgery are awarded to those who are the first to perform difficult operations. Judged by this standard, Dr. Mott is entitled to the first rank among the surgeons of the world. In his thirty-third year, he placed a ligature around arteries within two inches of the heart, an operation sufficient of itself to place him at the summit of his profession. In 1828, he performed what is universally allowed to be the most difficult feat ever attempted in surgery. A clergyman was afflicted with an enormous tumor in the neck, in which were embedded and twisted many of the great arteries. In removing this tumor, it was necessary to take out entire one of the collar-bones, to lay bare the membrane enclosing the lungs, to dissect around arteries displaced by the tumor and embedded in it, to apply forty ligatures, and remove an immense mass of diseased matter. All this was done without the aid of chloroform. The patient survived the operation, and is now living, and discharging the duties of his profession. Dr. Mott was the first to operate successfully for immovability of the lower jaw, and the first to entirely remove the lower jaw. He was the first to succeed in sewing up a slit in a large vein; and he did this in some cases