iv] of Glands and Tissues. 117 



on to the small arteries as " apples hang on to the branches of 

 a tree." And he stated his conviction that these capsules, which 

 have ever since borne his name, must play an important part in 

 the secretion of urine. 



Thus in 1666 Malpighi had arrived at a clear conception of 

 the structure of the kidney. And the world had long to wait 

 for any further large addition to our knowledge on this score. 

 It is true that we owe a minuter knowledge of the distribution 

 of the renal blood vessels to the skilled injections of Kuysch, 

 who, born in 1638 and called to the chair of Anatomy at 

 Amsterdam while Malpighi was at Messina, lived a life prolific 

 in work far on in the next century, until 1731, work which was 

 partly, and so far wrongly, directed towards undoing what 

 Malpighi had done, making the blood vessels the agents 

 instead of the aids of secretion. It is also true that Antoine 

 Ferrein, Professor at Montpellier and at Paris, made, nearly a 

 century later, in 1749, in company with many errors, and these 

 very great ones, a slight contribution to our knowledge when 

 he described the rays of straight tubules shooting up into 

 the cortex, since known as the pyramids of Ferrein. Putting 

 aside however these two things, we may almost say that our 

 knowledge of the kidney remained where Malpighi left it, 

 until in the generation which has just passed away Bowman 

 took up the subject again. 



Lastly, in his tract on the spleen, that organ to which in 

 the past so much honour had been paid, to which had been 

 attributed so many and such varied and important duties, 

 Malpighi brought into a region thick with the mists and clouds 

 of indistinct theories and speculation the dry light of exact 

 inquiry; and the mists and clouds forthwith dispersed. 



He gave a careful description of its structure, of its capsule, 

 trabecular and pulp, and of its blood vessels and nerves. The 

 trabecular he at first suspected to be nervous in character, but 

 he soon recognised that in many animals they were muscular or 

 at least contractile. " The fibres" (i.e. the trabecular), he says, "of 

 " the spleen are not, as I once thought, nervous but fleshy, so that 

 " by means of the external fleshy capsule and the fibres carried 

 "transversely from it is formed a remarkable muscle com- 



