HISTOLOGY OF THE STEIPED MUSCLE-F1BEE. 
37] 
> A Simplified View of the Histology of the 
Striped Muscle-Fibre. 
By 
B. Yfellaml, B.Sc., 
Platt Physiological Scholar in the Owens College, Manchester. 
With Plate XXIV. 
Introduction. 
Everyone who has considered the subject must admit the 
essential identity from a physiological point of view of all those 
tissues which possess in a special degree contractility. The 
contraction of a white blood-corpuscle or amoeba is essentially 
the same phenomenon as the contraction of an involuntary 
fibre-cell or a striped muscle-fibre. 
When we consider these three contractile tissues from a 
histological point of view we are struck by an apparently 
essential difference in character between the striped muscle- 
fibre and the elements of the other two contractile tissues, and 
indeed cells generally. The voluntary muscle-fibre is morpho- 
logically a cell like the muscle-fibre cell and the amoeboid 
corpuscle. Yet it differs from the latter and from all other 
cells in showing a characteristic transverse striation. 
According to Klein, 1 the protoplasm of the simpler con- 
tractile tissues, (1) the amoeboid cell, (2) the ciliated cell, and 
(3) the involuntary fibre-cell, agrees, inasmuch as it consists 
of two parts — a matrix and an arrangement of fine fibrils, 
the intracellular network. The actual arrangement of 
1 ‘ Klein, ‘ Atlas of Histology/ diagrams 1 and 4, and fig. 2, pi. xv. 
