560 EEPCRT — 1882. 



vessels, tlie mode in which they divice, the resistance ■which they offer to the flow 

 of blood through them, by modifying the pressure and velocity of the blood-flow 

 through the organ, induce secretions varying in character. It is strange to learn 

 from Haller, as was indubitably the fact, that the great majority of his con- 

 temporaries, such men as Pej'er and Vieussens, and even Boerhaave, adopted the 

 Kuyschian view of the structure of glands. The opposition to Ruysch came first 

 from Ferrein,' who maintained that the kidneys essentially consist of an assemblage 

 of convoluted tubes, which he looked upon to be the seat of the renal secretion — tubes 

 which a subsequent investigator, Schumlansky,* looked upon as taking their origin 

 in tlie acini of Malpighi, to which he referred the active part in secretion. Then 

 followed the researches of Mascagni and Oruickshank, who found, by injecting 

 quicksilver into tlie mammary glands, that the ramification of the ducts of this 

 organ terminate in racemose follicles ; though ]\Iascagni still admitted a connection, 

 by means of open pores, between the sides of tlie glandular blood-vessels and the 

 interior of the glands themselves. It was unquestionably Professor E. H. Weber, 

 of Leipzig, who completely demolished the Ruyschian hypothesis, and who by 

 numerous researches on the salivary glands of birds and of mammals, and on the 

 pancreas of birds, established the general fact of the termination of gland-ducts in blind 

 extremities, though with modesty he put forward his opinions as confirming the 

 inductions of Malpighi, expressing himself as follows: 'Admirably did Malpighi 

 avail himself of the structure of the liver in the lower animals, and the embryo 

 of the higher, as a foundation-stone for his opinions; for the arrangement of the 

 whole glandular system speaks for itself, inasmuch as it simply consists of single, 

 compact, hollow, blind canals, more or less numerous, floating in the fluid which 

 surrounds their organs ; and, although these ramifications are drawn out between 

 the branches of the blood-vessels, there is no immediate passage from one to the 

 other.' 



The Reseaeches of Johannes Mullee. 



Such was the state of knowledge in reference to the structure of secreting 

 glands and secretion at the time when the great Johannes Miiller undertook the 

 investigation of which the results were first of all published in the memorable work 

 entitled ' De Glandularum secementiuui Structurii penitiori earumque prima For- 

 matione.' ^ It is impossible not to sympathise with the reflection of Professor 

 Heidenhain, recently made in reviewing the researches of Johannes Miiller in con- 

 nection with this subject ;* to wit, that the physiologists of to-day may be accused 

 of ingratitude for having allowed the great name of Johannes Miiller to have 

 well-nityh disappeared from the pages of physiological literature. AVe forget that 

 this man — this giant in the field of biology as he is appropriately termed by 

 Heidenhain, the last man of whom perhaps it will ever be said that he was at once 

 the greatest comparative anatomist of his time, and the most philosophical and 

 orio-inal of all contemporary physiological writers — by his own researches, and 

 particularly by the one which concerns us to-day, influenced the progress of phy- 

 siology, at a most critical period, more than any other man. He was not, like his 

 contemporaries Magendie and Flourens, a great physiological experimenter, though 

 he showed that he well appreciated the value of experiment in advancing our 

 science; but he was pre-eminently a physiologist who recognised the immense 

 importance of a close study of structure, not only because of the interest which 

 it presents to the pure and philosophical morphologist, but because of its absolute 

 necessity, if we are to penetrate at all deeply into the secrets of animal function. 

 Miiller, "in the first instance, had convinced himself, by the study of the circulation 

 of organs sufficiently transparent to permit of it, especially the circulation through 



' Ferrein, ' Sur la structure des Glandes,' &c. Memoires de I' Acad. Roy. des Sciences 

 de Paris, 1749. 



2 Schumlansky, Bissertatw Inangur. Anatomica de Remim, stmctura, Argentoreti, 



1880. 



» Lips. 1830. 



* Heidenhain in Hermann's Handhuch der Physiclogie, vol. v. (1880) p. 6. 



