60 SKELETON. 



interruptedly with the longitudinal, which they unite to each 

 other."* 



The venerable Scarpa, some years ago, advanced opinions 

 adverse to the laminated and fibrous or filamentous tissue of 

 bones :f the latter doctrine he was induced to think a mere 

 mistake, arising from careless observation. Founding his own 

 views upon what he had seen in the growing bone, in the 

 adult bone when its earthy parts were removed by an acid, 

 and upon certain cases of disease attended with inflammation 

 of the bone; he denied, without reservation, the existence of la- 

 minae and fibres in bones, declaring that even the hardest of 

 them were cellular or reticulated. It appears to me, in look- 

 ing over his paper, that a desire to overthrow old doctrines and 

 to establish new ones, has induced him to make one omission in 

 the report of his experiments, otherwise unaccountable in a man 

 of his general intelligence and candour. Having softened the 

 cylindrical bones in an acid, he next proceeds to a long conti- 

 nued maceration of them ; he finds, as other persons have done, 

 the animal part of the bone finally resolving itself into a soft cot- 

 tony tissue. He has made but one jump from the immersion in 

 the acid to the last stage of the process of maceration. Now, if 

 in a short time after the bone had been softened in the acid, he 

 had admitted an intermediate observation, he would no doubt, 

 like all other inquirers, have found that the animal part of the cy- 

 lindrical bones was readily separable into laminae ; and that by a 

 pin or needle these laminae could be split into fibres, the greater 

 part of which are longitudinal; and that pounding the ends of 

 these fibres with a hammer would resolve them into a very fine 

 penicillous or pencil-like structure. There is no objection to 

 the u conclusion, that these laminae and filaments, as a final con- 

 dition, produce a very fine microscopical cellular arrangement, 

 which may be made more apparent in being distended by the de- 

 velopment of gaseous substances, arising from putrefaction or 

 maceration; but there is reason for a decided opposition to the 

 assertion of there being no fibres in bones, when we have daily 



* Manuel D'Anat. Gen. Descr. et Path, traduit dc L'Allemand par Jourdan et 

 Breschet. Paris, 1825. 



t A Scarpa. De penitiori ossium structura cornrncntarius. Leipp. 1795. See 

 also Anatomical Investigations, Philadelphia, 1824, by the late J. D. God-man, 

 M. D., for an English translation of the same. 



