1896. NOTES AND COMMENTS. 291 



The Transplantation of Living Tissues. 



The original experiments of Hunter, in which he transplanted 

 structures from one animal to another, probably led to the modern 

 attempts at bone- and skin-grafting. A few years ago, surgeons were 

 confident that grafts of bone from rabbits and calves might be 

 transferred to human bodies, while it was a current belief that skin 

 might easily be grafted, or blood transfused. Mr. H. G. Wells, 

 whose scientific novels have been a feature of the last two years, has 

 based the plot of his recent " Island of Dr. Moreau " on the artificial 

 production of semi-human beings from animals. Dr. Moreau is a 

 ferocious vivisector, with something of the hypnotist thrown in, and, 

 by carving living animals (without anaesthetics) for many consecutive 

 weeks, he has produced, and turned loose on his island, a set of 

 amusing creatures, such as wolf-hyaena-men, ox-hog-men, goat-vixen- 

 ladies, and a puma-dog-lady who escaped in an incomplete condition, 

 to the subsequent destruction of her artificer. The story is gruesome 

 and exciting to a high degree; but we have no doubt that our readers, 

 who have missed great delights if they have not read the earlier 

 •scientific novels and stories of Mr. Wells, will form their own opinion 

 of the qualities of the " Island of Dr. Moreau." From the scientific 

 side, however, Mr. Wells seems to us to have allowed his imagination 

 .too free a run in his new story. In the resume alluded to in our last 

 Note, Mr. Barfurth sums up recent work on transplantation and 

 transfusion conclusively against the success of operations conducted 

 upon animals of different species. Transplantations from one species 

 •to another almost invariably have proved unsuccessful. Most often 

 the transplanted pieces become centres of suppuration ; in the most 

 favourable cases, they serve as inert centres around which new 

 .growth takes place. Histological examination shows that they die. 

 So extreme is the aversion of a body to extrinsic material, that 

 transplantations from other individuals, even of the same species, 

 rarely hold ; they are treated as foreign bodies. The successes are 

 almost entirely confined to plastic operations in which material from 

 one part of a body is adapted to another part of the same body. 



The Vestige of the Yolk-Sack. 



Mr. Barfurth's section upon involution shows that rather less 

 work has been published in 1894 than in many earlier years. One of 

 the most interesting investigations was made upon the fate of the 

 yolk-sack, by Strahl and Bersch. In the case of the blind-worm, it 

 was found that the yolk-sack had completely disappeared six months 

 after birth. In the wall-lizard, they found that the yolk-sack 

 disappeared as a diverticulum of the gut, but was represented in the 

 adult by a little mass of black pigment — another instance of the 

 curious connection between degeneration tissues and the deposition of 

 pigment. We do not recall any other observations on the vestige of 



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