BOOK I. 



PART If. 



Of the Bones, individually. 



THE several textures of the body are so intermixed, that the 

 consideration of one alone, pursued through all its applications, 

 excludes for the time, rather artificially, some one or more of 

 the others. This circumstance, inseparable from a clear ac- 

 count, has always perplexed writers on anatomy, and left them 

 under various impressions concerning the best point of depar- 

 ture and method for pursuing. their descriptions. Reasons of 

 value may be urged for almost any arrangement : each one 

 will have some peculiar advantages that the others have not, 

 and which will cause it to appear to the understandings of its 

 advocates, superior to the rest. For a course of study which 

 is intended to be physiological and surgical in its combinations, 

 the usual practice of beginning with the skeleton is, perhaps, 

 the most advantageous; the young student will, however, un- 

 derstand that if the skeleton have any natural claim to this 

 precedence, it is principally from its furnishing those land- 

 marks, as it were, to which we refer the situation of other 

 parts, and that it is only conceded, for the purpose of laying a 

 foundation for their more easy and intelligible description sub- 

 sequently. The human frame may be compared to an extend- 

 ed landscape, the multiplicity of whose features and the variety 

 of objects spread over whose surface, collectively, bewilder the 

 beholder; but by seizing first on its prominent outlines, marking 

 the course of its mountains and ridges, and determining the 

 bearings of the several objects according to them, we become 

 able, at length, to define not only to ourselves, but to others, 

 the precise position of each point, or each object which may 

 become the subject of inspection. 



