COMPOSITION OF BONES. 59 



anatomists who have not adopted fully the opinion. Among 

 the moderns, the late M. Beclard, the distinguished and able 

 Professor of Anatomy in the School of Medicine in Paris, says, 

 that when the earth is removed from bones by an acid, if they 

 be softened by maceration in water, the compact substance, 

 which previously offered no apparent texture, is separated into 

 laminae, united by filaments; the laminae themselves, at a later 

 period, separate themselves into filaments; which, by a farther 

 continuation of the process swell, and become areolar arid soft. 

 A long bone examined after this process, divides its body into 

 several laminae, the most external of which envelops the rest; 

 and the remainder, by rarefying themselves towards the extre- 

 mities, are continuous with the cellular structure there. 



J. F. Meckel, of the University of Halle, has furnished the 

 following account in his General Anatomy of the Bones : 



" The filaments and the laminae which constitute the bones 

 are not simply applied one against the other, so as to extend 

 the whole length, breadth, or thickness of a bone, or to go from 

 its centre to the circumference. They lean in so many differ- 

 ent ways, one against another, arid unite so frequently by 

 transverse and oblique appendages or processes, that some 

 great anatomists, deceived by this arrangement, have doubted 

 the fibrous structure of bones. Nevertheless, their opinion is 

 not perfectly correct. In spite of those inflections and anasto- 

 moses of fibres, the fibrous. structure always remains very ap- 

 parent; and one is warranted in saying, that the dimension of 

 length exceeds the two others, in the texture of many bones. 

 This predominance is chiefly well marked in the first periods 

 of osteogeny ; for, at a later time, the fibres are so applied 

 against each other, as scarcely to be distinguished. But these 

 longitudinal fibres never exist alone; there are many oblique 

 or transverse ones from the first periods of ossification; and 

 they are even from the beginning so multiplied, that the num- 

 ber of longitudinal fibres does not prevail over them so much 

 as at a subsequent period, when the fibres approach nearer, in 

 such way that the transverse become oblique; until at last, 

 from the increase of the bone, the latter, at first view, seems to 

 be composed only of longitudinal fibres. The transverse and 

 oblique fibres do not form a separate system; but continue un- 



