MEDICINE IN MODERN TIMES. 711" 



one field, spreads into the weedy acres of his slothful brethren on 

 the right and left; and the improvement of the microscope has 

 but been accompanied by a more thorough and accurate working 

 out of human dissection. Let us leave metaphor and general state- 

 ments, and come to facts. I have in my possession a work written 

 for the use of anatomical students in the University of Edinburgh 

 — a place then, as now, at least on a level with the most advanced 

 centres of such education elsewhere in Great Britain. Its title is, 

 * The Anatomy of the Human Bones and Nerves, with a Description 

 of the Human Lacteal Sac and Duct, by Alexander Monro, M.D., 

 late Professor of Anatomy in the University of Edinburgh. A new 

 edition, carefully revised, with aditional Notes and Illustrations, by 

 Jeremiah Kirby, M.D., author of " Tables of the Materia Medica." 

 1810.' The date of its appearance takes precedence, therefore, by a 

 dozen years at least, of the first appearance of an achromatic com- 

 bination ; and if the development of microscopic zeal had really 

 been injurious to the difi'usion of thorough anthropotomical know- 

 ledge, we should find here in perfection that precision and fulness 

 which eos Jiypothesi are the exclusive fruits of individual attention 

 and undistracted concentration. Now, a few weeks ago, I was 

 pursuing some anatomical researches into the homologies of the 

 shoulder-joint muscles, and by the suggestion of one or two of my 

 friends, amongst whom I may mention Dr. Boycott, I took up the 

 line of argument for homological identity which innervation 

 furnishes. Being deep in the country, I was reduced to consult, in 

 the absence for the moment of other books, the work I have just 

 mentioned, for a small matter in the composition and decomposi- 

 tion of the brachial plexus. This is what I found to satisfy my 

 enquiry in a book expressly treating, you will please to recollect, 

 of the nerves, and written by one of those 'famous old anthro- 

 potomists ' who were not distracted by ' microscopische Spielereien.' 

 *The fourth cervical nerve, after sending ofi" that branch which 

 joins with the third to form the phrenic, and bestowing twigs on 

 the muscles and glands of the neck, runs to the armpit, where 

 it meets with the fifth, sixth, and seventh cervicals, and first dorsal, 

 that escape in the interstices of the musculi scaleni, to come at the 

 armpit, where they join, separate, and rejoin in a way scarcely to be 

 rightly expressed in words ; and, after giving several considerable 

 nerves to the muscles and teguments which cover the tliorax^ they 



