The fishes are also employed for the same purpose on any yard, which happens to be sprung or fractured. Thus their form, application, and utility are exactly like those of the splinters applied to a broken limb in surgery.

Falconer was the son of a barber in Edinburgh where he was born became a sailor and was thus thoroughly competent to describe the management of the storm-tossed vessel the career and fate of which are described in his poem The Shipwreck (1762) a work of genuine though unequal talent. Falconer's poems were used by Patrick O'Brian in his Aubrey-Maturin series. External links
Biography
William Falconer's Dictionary of the Marine (National Library of Australia).

In 1769 he publiWilliam Falconerd The Universal Marine Dictionary. One of his lesser characters is a nautical poet but his poems are Falconer's. Falconer was purser on the frigate Aurora when it was lost after rounding the Cape of Good Hope on a voyage when it left from London on 20 September 1769.