“Third.  By a peculiar arrangement of the knee-joint, it is rendered little liable to wear, and all lateral or rotary motion is avoided.  It is hardly necessary to remark that any such motion is undesirable in an artificial leg, as it renders its support unstable.”

Before reporting some of the facts which we have seen, or learned by personal inquiry, we must be allowed, for the sake of convenience, to exercise the privilege granted to all philosophical students, of enlarging the nomenclature applicable to the subject of which we are treating.

Man, according to the Sphinx, is successively a quadruped, a biped, and a triped.  But circumstances may change his natural conditions.  If he loses a leg, he becomes a uniped.  If he loses both his legs, he becomes a nulliped.  If art replaces the loss of one limb with a factitious substitute, he becomes a ligniped, or, if we wish to be very precise, a uni-ligniped; two wooden legs entitle him to be called a biligniped.  Our terminology being accepted, we are ready to proceed.

To make ourselves more familiar with the working of the invention we are considering, we have visited Mr. Palmer’s establishments in Philadelphia and Boston.  The distinguished “Surgeon-Artist” is a man of fine person, as we have said.  But if he has any personal vanity, it does not betray itself with regard to that portion of his organism which Nature furnished him.  There is some reason to think that Mr. Palmer is a little ashamed of the lower limb which he brought into the world with him.  At least, if he follows the common rule and puts that which he considers his best foot foremost, he evidently awards the preference to that which was born of his brain over the one which he owes to his mother.  He walks as well as many do who have their natural limbs, though not so well as some of his own patients.  He puts his vegetable leg through many of the movements which would seem to demand the contractile animal fibre.  He goes up and down stairs with very tolerable ease and despatch.  Only when he comes to stand upon the human limb, we begin, to find that it is not in all respects equal to the divine one.  For a certain number of seconds he can poise himself upon it; but Mr. Palmer, if he indulges in verse, would hardly fill the Horatian complement of lines in that attitude.  In his anteroom were unipeds in different stages of their second learning to walk as lignipeds.  At first they move with a good deal of awkwardness, but gradually the wooden limb seems to become, as it were, penetrated by the nerves, and the intelligence to run downwards until it reaches the last joint of the member.

Mr. Palmer, as we have incidentally mentioned, has a branch establishment in Boston, to which also we have paid a visit, in order to learn some of the details of the manufacture to which we had not attended in our pleasant interview with the inventor.  The antechamber here, too, was the nursery of immature lignipeds, ready to exhibit their growing accomplishments to the inquiring stranger.  It almost seems as if the artificial leg were the scholar, rather than the person who wears it.  The man does well enough, but the leg is stupid until practice has taught it just what is expected from its various parts.