158 
Ovh the Sesammds of the Knee- Joint 
records of other anatomists because his own large bnt necessarily limited experience 
has not confirmed theirs*. 
Again in new-born mammals he admits that hyaline cartilaginous /a6e?Zae are 
to be seen (pp. 69 — 70) "as small faint points or streaks macroscopically visible," 
and yet he asserts that no traces of the fahellue are to be found in man before 
10 years of age, although elsewhere he emphasises the point that the fabellae in 
man and the lower animals are " vollig analog." We believe that sparsity of 
material and the comparative ease with which when they do occur (as anomaly) 
they would escape notice probably account for the discrepancy. The statement 
that orthosesamoids are always prefigured by hyaline cartilaginous hemisesamoids 
is very definite and emphasised in the very title of Gruber's paper. All state- 
ments as to sesamoids arising from ossification of fibro-cartilage are Gruber tells 
us incorrect (p. 68). If Gruber be right then we have another and striking instance 
of how erroneous statements are still perpetuated in the history of sesamoids. 
For Pfitzner writing only 17 years later, and referring to Gruber's memoir f as 
a classic of the subject still speaks of our hemisesamoids as developing from 
" faserigen Gewebe " (S. 563), and even as late as 1897 in the Seventh Report of the 
Co7iimittee of Collective Investigation of tJte Anatomical Society of Oreat Britain 
we find sesamoids divided into two classes : " firstly those in which the bodies are 
osseous, and secondly those in which they were of some other material (fibrous, 
fibro-cartilaginous, or cartilaginous)!. Thus if Gruber's statement be correct, it has 
not got current in the course of 20 years in English anatomy ; if incorrect, not 
even as accurate a German as Pfitzner thought it desirable apparently to issue a 
formal contradiction! Yet Gruber wrote in 1875 that true sesamoids are always 
prefigured by the existence of hyaline cartilage, never by fibro-cartilage (p. 65). 
This prefiguration, he tells us, had not been previously noted in man, and had 
not been adequately emphasised in mammals generally. All statements as to 
sesamoids arising from ossification of fibro-cartilage are incorrect (p. 68). Surely such 
a statement from such an authority deserved at least a contradiction if incorrect ? 
Yet the anatomists still talk glibly of the origin of sesamoids by intensive stress 
in fibro-cartilage, and it is left to biometricians to confirm or confute Gruber ! We 
were not able to make an intensive investigation, but we pursued two lines 
of research. 
(i) We had sections taken of the fabellae and the cyaniella, or rather of the 
nodules where we should suppose them to be, of a kitten at birth. The lateral 
fahella and the cyamella exhibited a kernel of hyaline cartilage. We were less 
successful in our sections of the me^xdX fahella, either it was absent, or else the very 
* AH statements during 319 years of the existence of a mesial fahella in man are " durchaus 
irrige " (p. 67), Gruber even goes so far as to assert that owing to the Bursa mucosa supracondyloidea 
interna (discovered by him) the internal fahella in man would be rather harmful than valuable if it 
occurred in the neighbourhood of this bursa, and if some 2 cms. higher than the external fahella would be 
useless (p. 68). This appeal to " use" is odd. 
t Pfitzner gives the wrong volume T. xxiv instead of T. xxii of the St Petersburg memoirs as the 
locus of Gruber's monograph. 
J See also Humphry, Quaiu and other English anatomists for the fibro-cartilaginous sesamoid. 
