712 PHYSIOLOaY IN RELATION TO 



divide into several branches, to be distributed to all parts of the 

 superior extremity. Seven of these branches I shall describe under 

 particular names' (p. 291). These seven branches have the parti- 

 cular names of Scapularis, Articularis, Cutaneus, Musculo-Cutaneus, 

 Muscularis, Ulnaris, and Radialis. Of such little trifles as the 

 connection of the second and third cervical sympathetic ganglia 

 which gives off heart-nerves with the arm-nerves, upon which 

 connection the pain down the inside of the arm in heart-disease 

 Niemeyer (ii. 338) supposes may, and the older anatomists would 

 have said rmist depend ; as the subclavius nerve and its connection 

 with the phrenic, and so with the shoulder- tip pain in liver-disease, 

 we have just as little mention made as we have of the nerves 

 supplying those small muscles, the pectorales. Surely knowledge 

 is not like a volcanic archipelago, where the upheaval of one mass 

 of solid ground entails the submergence of another ; rather it 

 resembles some vast table-land which is rising, and now and then 

 at accelerated rates of progress^ out of the waters, and has, in these 

 days of the subdivision of property and of labour, its broad and 

 continuous surface seized upon, partitioned out by enclosures, and 

 put under cultivation by various occupants so soon as ever its out- 

 lines are recognisable. 



My last topic in this division of my address is the connection 

 which Comparative Anatomy has with Medicine and Surgery, and 

 the bearing which a cultivation of this department of Biology has, 

 or is likely to have, upon the interests of the profession. Of the 

 benefits which Comparative Anatomy receives at the hands of 

 medical practitioners there is little occasion to speak ; or rather 

 Mr. Parker's volume on 'The Shoulder Girdle,' just published by 

 the Eay Society, may speak for me ; it is only less vast than 

 valuable, and will constitute the commencement of a new epoch in 

 the science. But what I have to speak to is, not the benefits 

 which Comparative Anatomy receives, but those which it can 

 confer. And I believe that the educational working of this study 

 is perhaps the particular line along which the best fruits for the 

 profession, and for the public, may reasonably be looked for. Any 

 study which forces its students into that most valuable knowledge 

 — the knowledge of when a thing is proved, and when it is not — 

 is ipso facto an ally of real medicine, and a deadly enemy of 

 quackery. A person who has in any way become acquainted with 



