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or muscular insertion, be very different in length, a suppo- 
sition which is not supported by observation. ‘The tendon is 
accordingly, when looked at as a whole, constructed precisely 
like the muscle, if thin inoblasts arranged close one to the 
other be mentally substituted for the transversely striated, 
spindle-shaped muscular fibres. The facts of embryology 
teach, as is well known, that tendons, like muscles, originally 
consist of series of spindle-shaped cells ; and from what has 
been said above, it results that these relations remain un- 
altered in the main through the whole of life. 
The connective-tissue fibres are, as has been said, nothing 
more than long, narrow radiations of the embryonal spindle- 
shaped cells; but while the latter contain albuminous proto- 
plasma, the radiations consist (apart from the scattered 
granules at their origin above mentioned) of homogeneous 
gelatinous substance. 
The differences between reticular and fibrillated connective 
tissue reduce themselves accordingly to the different amount 
of interstitial fluid, without reckoning the anastomoses, which 
may perhaps be quite wanting in the fibrillated form. The 
tendon is composed of spindle-shaped or stellate, or again of 
flattened inoblasts, the prolongations of which all run in the 
same direction, namely, in the long axis of the tendon. In 
the reticular connective tissue the prolongations cross one 
another. In all connective tissue which is composed of bundles 
the arrangement seen in the tendons is repeated, only that 
the prolongations of the inoblasts stretch a little inwards 
towards the central axis of the original fibrillar bundle, since 
the corpuscles or nucleus-like central portions of the inoblasts 
are situated, as is well known, only on the outer envelope of 
the primitive fasciculi. 
The most important point is that the connective-tissue 
fibres of authors are not intercellular substance, but processes 
of cells, and there is accordingly no intercellular substance 
in fibrillated connective tissue except the tissue-fluid which 
permeates the interstices. Since this fluid usually contains 
some leucocytes (lymph corpuscles, migratory cells, ameeboid 
cells, unattached connective-tissue corpuscles of different 
authors), as is certainly not the case in the tendon, it may be 
designated as lymph. In this way a perfect analogy with 
the reticular connective tissue is established. 
According, then, to what has been said, the inoblasts of any 
portion of connective tissue are collectively identical with the 
connective-tissue nuclei and connective-tissue fibres of earlier 
authors, or with the nuclei of connective-tissue corpuscles, 
plus intercellular substance of later authors (Virchow). For 
