author's abstract of THIS PAPER ISSUED 

 BY THE BIBLIOGRAPHIC SERVICE, APRIL 6 



ON THE RELATIVE VASCULARITY OF VARIOUS PARTS 



OF THE CENTRAL NERVOUS SYSTEM 



OF THE ALBINO RAT 



EDWARD HORNE CRAIGIE 



Department of Biology, University of Toronto, and The Wistar Institute of Anatomy 



and Biology 



FIVE FIGURES AND FOUR CHARTS 



The blood supply of the brain has been the object of study on 

 the part of many anatomists from the time of Galen to the present 

 day and the relations of the principal vessels have long been 

 well known. The difference in vascularity between the gray 

 and white matter in the brain and spinal cord has also been 

 discussed by numerous authors. So far as the present writer 

 has been able to discover, however, there does not seem to have 

 been any attempt hitherto to make an exact quantitative com- 

 parison of the vascularity of the various structures in the central 

 nervous system. 



Ekker ('53) l made some general comparisons of capillary 

 richness in various parts of the brain, but although he records 

 some measurements of the diameter of vessels, nothing of im- 

 portance is noted. According to him, the portion of the brain 

 which is most richly supplied is the corpus striatum. The 

 earlier work on this aspect of the subject was not very important. 

 Guyot, in 1825, succeeded in isolating the vessels of the cerebral 

 substance with forceps and a stream of water, and reached the 

 conclusion that the white matter had no blood supply. Upon 

 this observation he based the opinion that the white matter has 

 no active function, but is entirely passive. Various writers 



1 The writer is indebted for information regarding this paper to Dr. C. Judson 

 Herrick, who kindly reviewed it for him in the Surgeon General's Library at Wash- 

 ington. Later the writer had the privilege of examining a copy nimself in the 

 library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia. 



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