Foreign Literature and Science. 185 



according to their attainments. A professor has been sent 

 from Brussels to acquire this method of instruction, in order 

 to introduce it into the capital of Belgium. Let us hope 

 that the university of France will not allow foreigners to 

 take the lead in this system, but that it will promptly intro- 

 duce it into the inferior classes of the Royal Colleges, 

 This hope is the better founded, as the members of the 

 corps of instruction, who have studied the work, or attend- 

 ed the school of the Rector of Besan^on, found nothing to 

 object to the method, and accorded with all those who have 

 re'flected on the subject, as regarding this system as infinite-^ 

 ly superior to the existing method, the great defects of 

 which occasion so much daily trouble to parents and the 

 friends of youth. 



25. Physiology. — Dr. Magendie, of Paris, has commen- 

 ced the publication of a Quarterly Journal, entitled " Jour- 

 nal de Physiologie experimentale." The first three num- 

 bers have reached us, in which we find several interesting 

 memoirs from the pen of that ingenious and indefatigable 

 physiologist. In a short memoir on the structure of the 

 Lungs in men, contained in the first number, the following 

 facts are stated : 1st. That the greater part of the organic 

 tissues contain so great a number of blood vessels, that 

 they appear to be entirely formed of them. We may con- 

 sider this fact as the actual limit of the anatomy of struc- 

 ture. 2d. That the best mode of studying the structure of 

 the pulmonary organ is to inflate it partially by the orifice 

 of one of the bronchial tubes, place a ligature so as to pre- 

 vent the escape of the air, and then to let it dry in the 

 open air, or before a fire. It is then transparent, and may 

 easily be cut by a sharp instrument into thin shces. 3d. If 

 one of them be held between the eye and a light, the pul- 

 monary cells may be easily distinguished. These cells as- 

 sume no regular form, appear to have no membranous 

 parietes, but to consist entirely of the ultimate divisions of 

 the pulmonary artery, the radicules of the pulmonary veins 

 and of the multiplied anastomoses of all these vessels. 4th. 

 That the cells of the lungs increase in size and diminish in 

 number, as life advances. 5th. The specific gravity of the 

 lungs is accordingly so diminished by age, that the lungs of 

 an old man weighed fourteen times less than an equal vol- 



Vol. V,— No. 1. 24 



