INTRODUCTION. 3 



of the greatest value, the best thing this subject can do for 

 the student is to allow him to make his own observations as 

 far as possible, and to make his own interpretations of 

 experiments from related facts out of his own experience. 

 There is not so much educational value in knowing that the 

 heart possesses auricles, ventricles and valves, as there is 

 in finding and understanding them when a real heart is being 

 examined. There is an endless difference in mental value 

 between learning a few curious things about the brain from 

 the book or a cheap model, or even the description of a 

 teacher, and in studying for ourselves, in detail, the varied 

 anatomy of a real sheep's brain. One leaves us with hazy 

 and dim ideas, the only real, tangible thing of which are the 

 words to symbolize them, but the other results in real, 

 definite, and lasting information. To have dissected out the 

 salivary glands on the sheep's head, furnished by the meat 

 market ; to have seen the Eustachian tube ; to have cut out 

 the tonsils ; observed the large circumvallate papillae on the 

 tongue ; to have seen the lens and separated the coats of the 

 eye ; to have hunted for and found the middle ear with its 

 chain of bones, possibly to have laid open the cochlea; to 

 have seen all these things on a single sheep's head, will be 

 of more lasting benefit and real educational worth than the 

 ability to repeat from memory a chapter at a time of the 

 latest edition of Quain's Anatomy. If, to carry the sug- 

 gestion a little further, the student could observe and study 

 with his own eyes the sympathetic system as it hangs dis- 

 played in every meat market, if he could but see one 

 ganglion, one nerve trunk, and really learn to know it, if 

 he could grasp with the fingers of his hand as well as those 

 of his mind a single typical gland, crush with his thumb but 

 one lymphatic nodule to know it, if in short he could get 

 a living knowledge of the more important structures alone, 

 he would not only have acquired facts which are indelible 

 and can be turned to practical advantage, but he will have 

 acquired a discipline in their acquisition which will give 

 added power to the entire mind. Furthermore, and possibly 



