208 GEORGE W. CORNER 



for I do not find it in any antecedent work, nor in a painstaking 

 review of current knowledge of the pancreas published in an 

 inaugural dissertation by one Philip D'Orville at Ley den in 1745, 

 nineteen years before the celebrated Elementa Physiologiae ap- 

 peared. Haller's words are these: ''Totum nempe sit ex lobis, 

 parum distinctis, qui & ipsi ex minoribus fiunt lohulis, iique 

 minores lobuli & ipsi in acinos discedunt." (1764.) 



In later times Harris and Gow ('93) in describing the pancreas 

 as found in a large number of species, apply the term lobule in 

 the old variable sense: 



The size and shape of the lobules of the gland vary considerably in 

 the glands of different animals and indeed to a lesser extent in the same 

 gland, but the general characteristics are fairly well maintained in 

 each gland. In the human pancreas, for example, the lobules are la'ge 

 and irregular in shape, but they are distinctly mapped out from each 

 other; in the monkey they are larger but less distinct; whereas in the 

 pancreases of the cat and dog and other animals closely associated 

 with them the lobules are small and quite distinct; in the dingo-dog, 

 glutton, and weasel the lobules are still smaller; on the other hand in 

 certain pancreases hardly any differentiation can be made out, and 

 the tissue appears almost exactly like sections of the liver, or still more 

 like sections of the adrenal. 



Opie ('03) and Flint ('03) took the cat's pancreas as the type, 

 and described as the lobule the smallest portion of the gland 

 which is separated off by connective tissue. According to their 

 descriptions this 'primary lobule' is a rounded mass from 1 to 

 2.5 millimeters in diameter, surrounded by connective tissue, 

 drained by a duct, and supplied either by an arteriole or by cap- 

 illaries from an interlobar artery. From six to twenty of these 

 primary lobules are grouped together to form a 'secondary lob- 

 ule,' which is provided in turn with its own artery and duct, 

 composed by the union of the vessels of the component primary 

 lobules. I.aguesse ('05) does not consider the primary lobule of 

 Opie an independent unit. (He worked with human material, in 

 which, as pointed out by Harris and Gow, the demarcations 

 aie not similar to those in the cat.) He believes the secondary 

 lobules, or lobule-groups, of Opie to be the smallest indivisible 

 regularly repeated units composing the pancreas, and compli- 

 cates the situation by giving the term 'lobule' to the larger 



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