IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 25 



the points of minute anatomy were involved in obscu- 

 rity. Some found globules everywhere, some fibres. 

 Students disputed whether the conjunctiva extended 

 over the cornea or not, and worried themselves over 

 Gaultier de Claubry's stratified layers of the skin, or 

 Breschet's blennogenous and chromatogenous organs. 

 The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal a 

 myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the 

 golden fleece. The structure of bone, now so beauti- 

 fully made out, — even that of the teeth, in which 

 old Leeuwenhoek, peeping with his octogenarian eyes 

 through the minute lenses wrought with his own hands, 

 had long ago seen the " pipes," as he called them, — 

 was hardly known at all. The minute structure of the 

 viscera lay in the mists of an uncertain microscopic 

 vision. The intimate recesses of the animal system 

 were to the students of anatomy what the interior of 

 Africa long was to geographers, and the stories of 

 microscopic explorers were as much sneered at as those 

 of Bruce or Du Chaillu, and with better reason. 



Now what have we come to in our own day? In 

 the first place, the minute structure of all the organs 

 has been made out in the most satisfactory way. The 

 special arrangements of the vessels and the ducts of all 

 the glands, of the air-tubes and vesicles of the lungs, 

 of the parts which make up the skin and other mem- 

 branes, all the details of those complex parenchymatous 

 organs which had confounded investigation so long, 

 have been lifted out of the invisible into the sight of all 

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