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V. The Croonian Lecture. On the structure of a muscular fibre 
from which is derived its elongation and contraction . By 
Sir Everard Home, Bart. V. P. R. S. 
Read December 15, 1825. 
In the course of the last 40 years I have given this Lecture 
more frequently than any Member of the Society ; and, like 
my predecessors, on those occasions, have taken up the sub- 
jects most nearly connected with the inquiry for which the 
Lecture was instituted. 
As far back as the year 1818, while considering the mode 
in which coagulated blood us rendered vascular, I brought 
forward a magnified drawing of a muscular fibre made by Mr. 
Bauer, showing it to be composed of a single row of globules 
— - — parts of an inch in diameter, or in other words, of red 
globules deprived of their colouring matter. 
From that time I had not proceeded further in investi- 
gating muscular structure, but the appearance of the nervous 
fibres of the great splanchnic ganglion in Mr. Bauer's mag- 
nified drawings, which I laid before the Society last spring, 
led me to consider that the organization of these fibres must 
be so closely allied to that of muscles, that every physiologist 
who examined the drawings, must immediately come to the 
same conclusion ; and no sooner would those drawings be in 
the hands of the public, than any one might with the greatest 
