Our freely expressed admiration led to the telling of wonderful stories about the doings of persons with artificial legs.  One individual was mentioned who skated particularly well; another who danced with zeal and perseverance; and a third who must needs swim in his leg, which brought on a dropsical affection of the limb,—­to which kind of complaint the willow has, of course, a constitutional tendency,—­and for which it had to come to the infirmary where the diseases that wood is heir to are treated.

But the most wonderful monuments of the great restorer’s skill are the patients who have lost both legs,—­nullipeds, as presented to Mr. Palmer, bilignipeds, as they walk forth again before the admiring world, balanced upon their two new-born members.  We have before us delineations of six of these hybrids between the animal and vegetable world.  One of them was employed at a railway-station near this (Atlantic) city, where he was often seen by a member of our own household, whose testimony we are in the habit of considering superior in veracity to the naked truth as commonly delivered.  He walked about, we are assured, a little slowly and stiffly, but in a way that hardly attracted attention.

The inventor of the leg has not been contented to stop there.  He has worked for years upon the construction of an artificial arm, and has at length succeeded in arranging a mechanism, which, if it cannot serve a pianist or violinist, is yet equal to holding the reins in driving, receiving fees for professional services, and similar easy labors.  Where Mr. Palmer means to stop in supplying bodily losses it would be premature to say.  We suppose the accidents happening occasionally from the use of the guillotine are beyond his skill, and spare our readers the lively remark suggested by the contrary hypothesis.

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It is one of the signs of our advancing American civilization, that the arts which preserve and restore the personal advantages necessary or favorable to cultivated social life should have reached such perfection among us.  American dentists have achieved a reputation which has sent them into the palaces of Europe to open the mouths of sovereigns and princes as freely as the jockeys look into those of horses and colts.  Bad teeth, too common among us, help to breed good dentists, no doubt; but besides this there is an absolute demand for a certain comeliness of person throughout all the decent classes of our society.  It is the same standard of propriety in appearances which lays us open to the reproach of caring too much for dress.  If the national ear for music is not so acute as that of some other peoples, the national eye for the harmonies of form and color is better than we often find in older communities.  We have a right to claim that our sculptors and painters prove so much as this for us.  American taste was offended, outraged, by the odious “peg” which the Old-World soldier or beggar was proud to show.  We owe the well-shaped, intelligent, docile limb, the half-reasoning willow of Mr. Palmer, to the same sense of beauty and fitness which moulded the soft outlines of the Indian Girl and the White Captive in the studio of his namesake at Albany.