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At a recent meeting of the New York Academy of Medicine Dr. John H. Girdner gave an interesting demonstration of the detection and locating of metallic masses imbedded in the human body, by means of the induction balance and the telephonic probe. As is well known, this apparatus is the invention of Professor Alexander Graham Bell, of Washington, and the method was suggested in the summer of 1881, in connection with the case of the late President Garfield. It will be remembered that an attempt was then made to locate the ball in the President's body by means of the induction balance; but on account of the crudity of the apparatus, the lack of experience in its use, and, more than all, to the disturbing influence of a large steel mattrass on which the patient lay—the existence of which was unknown at the time of the attempt—the result was anything