212 BIOLOGICAL PHYSICS 



as special, attention, while we also perceive, that its 

 bearings on the subject of the body generally requires 

 to be pursued with an eye to the reaping of whatever 

 utilitarian advantages it can afford, in indicating, especially, 

 the lines along which medical and surgical art can pro- 

 ceed with the greatest hope of success, in the treatment of 

 disease, the maintenance of health and the rectification of 

 faulty structure. 



The skin, moreover, being to a great extent struc- 

 turally, as well as functionally, entitled to rank as an 

 organism, separate from the proper body structures and 

 organs which it encloses, with special duties to perform, 

 and a protective regime to fulfil, we must be prepared to 

 find, in and on it, much of independent pathological 

 change, dependent on merely local conditions, and much 

 due to its connection with the proper body structures, and 

 organs, and, therefore, much time and effort will have 

 to be spent, in the tracing of inter-relationships and 

 inter-dependencies of superficial and deep-seated disease, 

 respectively, in order that these skin affections may be 

 traced to their sources and appropriate curative, as well 

 as preventive, measures, be adopted. In this regard, we 

 repeat, that these sources will very, indeed, most fre- 

 quently, be found in, and to emanate from, the central 

 nervous system, with its surrounding layers of cerebro- 

 spinal fluid, where the required facilities for the entrance, 

 accumulation and spread of chemical and bacterial 

 morbific agencies abound, and whence also the requisite 

 distributive media are supplied, ready to hand, in the 

 continuous, inter-meningeal and inter-neurilemmar spaces 

 of brain, cord and nerves which ultimately debouch 

 within and on the surface of the skin, throughout its 

 entire extent. 



It ought here to be added that the study of the 

 incidence of skin disease as thus viewed, sheds a " com- 

 parative" light, of a most illuminating character, on the 

 incidence of disease, as it manifests itself in the motor 

 aspect of the systemic nervature, and in the compoundly 

 innervated structures of the various viscera, and internal 

 membrane invested cavities of the body; thus, to mention 

 but one instance of the occurrence of bacterio-pathological 



