THE HUMAN STERNUM 



INTRODUCTION 



THE subject of this memoir furnished the material for three Hunterian 

 Lectures delivered at the College of Surgeons of England, in 

 November, 1903. In preparing the lectures, one was forcibly struck 

 with the difference between our outlook on anatomical problems and the 

 view which Hunter took. He was essentially practical, teleological, and 

 a strict adherent of nature. All his works are strikingly illustrative of the 

 correlation of structure and function, and his writings are singularly devoid 

 of transcendentalism. While he invariably takes a broad and comprehensive 

 view of any anatomical problem, his investigations are never disturbed or 

 warped by the influence of nebulous hypotheses. He had the insight, the 

 imagination of the investigator, but it was controlled by sanity and common 

 sense. 



Hunter's writings, further, do not contain a single suggestion bearing 

 upon the subject of these lectures. The difficulties that we are now grappling 

 with had not then arisen. He never uses the work ' Morphology,' and 

 homologies had not then acquired the importance that they now possess. 



Vertebral Segmentation 



The sternum is as good an illustration as any part of the animal 

 economy of the tendency of modern anatomical thought, which, essentially 

 morphological and architectural, has been influenced by views of vertebral 

 segmentation to regard the sternum as a part of the skeleton intrinsically 

 associated with the costal arches. 



It is conceivable that we are going too far in our adherence to the idea 

 of segmentation of the vertebrate body. In the construction of the skull, 

 and the relation of the limbs to the trunk, evidence may be adduced to 



