IN MEDICAL SCIENCE. 29 



structureless solid, is seen to be extensively employed 

 in the body under the name of cartilage. Out of this 

 the surfaces of the articulations and the springs of the 

 breathing apparatus are formed. But when Nature 

 came to the buffers of the spinal column (interverte- 

 bral disks) and the washers of the joints (semilunar 

 fibro-cartilages of the knee, etc.), she required more 

 tenacity than common cartilage possessed. What did 

 she do ? What does man do in a similar case of need ? 

 I need hardly tell you. The mason lays his bricks in 

 simple mortar. But the plasterer works some hair into 

 the mortar which he is going to lay in large sheets on 

 the walls. The children of Israel complained that 

 they had no straw to make their bricks with, though 

 portions of it may still be seen in the crumbling pyra- 

 mid of Darshour, which they are said to have built. 

 I visited the old house on Witch Hill in Salem a year 

 or two ago, and there I found the walls coated with 

 clay in which straw was abundantly mingled ; — the 

 old Judaizing witch-hangers copied the Israelites in a 

 good many things. The Chinese and the Corsicans 

 blend the fibres of amianthus in their pottery to give 

 it tenacity. Now to return to Nature. To make her 

 buffers and washers hold together in the shocks to 

 which they would be subjected, she took common car- 

 tilage and mingled the white fibrous tissue with it, to 

 serve the same purpose as the hair in the mortar, the 

 straw in the bricks and in the plaster of the old wall, 

 and the amianthus in the earthen vessels. Thus we 



