CERTAIN TERMINAL ORGANS OF THE SKATE. 515 
Note on Certain Terminal Organs resembling 
Touch-corpuscles or End-bulbs in intra-mus- 
cular Connective-tissue of the Skate. 
By 
George Carrington Purvis, M.D., B.Sc., 
Demonstrator of Zoology, University of Edinburgh. 
With part of Plate XXXIII. 
In the spring of 1888, whilst examining the musculus 
sacro-lumbalis (Cuvier) of Raia clavata with gold chloride, 
I was struck with certain bodies which resembled end-bulbs. 
Assuming that they had most probably been described, I took 
no further notice of them beyond making a few sketches at the 
time; but on looking over some of the more recent text-books 
on histology I found no mention of such bodies in intra- 
muscular connective tissue, and have therefore felt that a brief 
description of these structures may be of some interest. 
MetruHop oF INVESTIGATION. 
A small piece of the fresh muscle was taken and placed on 
the freezing-plate of a Cathcart microtome, a drop of gum being 
first placed on the plate between it and the tissue. The gum 
and muscle were next frozen by means of ether spray, and sec- 
tions of varying thickness (probably from 4; to 74; mm.) were 
cut with an ordinary razor.1 The sections were next treated 
after Golgi’s arsenic acid method of gold chloride impregnation,” 
1 T resort to the freezing microtome when I intend to manipulate sections 
of perfectly fresh tissues. For histological work in general, no method can 
compare with the paraffin method as elaborated at Naples and elsewhere. 
2 «Mem. d. Roy. Accad. d. Sc. d. Torino,’ ser. ii, 1880. 
