68 GENERAL ANATOMY OF THE TISSUES. 



If, now, it were assumed that the former have a determinate 

 relation to the conduction of the nutritive fluid, it would yet 

 remain unexplained why, in certain regions, these organs were 

 more favoured than in others. If it be further considered, 

 that in the tendons and ligaments, as in the connective tissue 

 in general, vegetative molecular changes and nutrition are 

 assuredly at their lowest stage, — furthermore, that the arrange- 

 ment of the nucleus-fibres (their more longitudinal course, 

 the want of anastomosis of the nucleus-fibres of the different 

 secondary bundles in tendons) appears very little fitted to 

 conduct nutritious fluids from the surfaces of these organs, 

 where only the vessels are found, into their interior, — there will 

 appear no great necessity for entering further into this 

 hypothesis. For the cornea alone, where the elastic tissue 

 remains in a quite embryonic stage, should I be inclined to 

 adopt Virchow's hypothesis ; and, as respects the other tissues, 

 I can only grant that, when the elastic elements are in such 

 an imperfectly developed condition that they still contain 

 canals for greater or less distances, they may have a share in 

 the distribution of the nutritive fluid which naturally inter- 

 penetrates these organs, and, therefore, in their nutrition, but 

 that this must rather be regarded as a secondary function, 

 and will not justify their approximation to the fine canals of 

 the teeth and bones, which exist specially for the purpose of 

 nutrition. 



Such a function might much rather be ascribed to the 

 undeveloped nucleus-fibres and their formative cells in the 

 immature (pathological or normal) connective tissue ; for here, 

 at least, the anatomical and physiological relations of the tissue 

 are not opposed to such an assumption ; it would amount to little 

 more, however, than what may be asserted of every undeveloped 

 fibrous tissue. 



A second and much more important point in which I differ 

 from Donders and Virchow is the general mode of looking 

 at the connective tissue. Both these writers hold that it is 

 not composed of cells, but is developed by the fibrillation of a 

 homogeneous cytoblastema; and they believe that all the 

 fusiform embryonic cells, which since Schwann's time have 

 been regarded as its formative cells, belong not to it, but to the 

 clastic tissue. I can bv no means admit such a view, and it 



