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IV. On the Structure and Use of the Malpighian Bodies of the Kidney , with Observa- 
tions on the Circulation through that Gland. By W. Bowman, F.R.S., Assistant 
Surgeon to the King's College Hospital, and Demonstrator of Anatomy in King's 
College, London. 
Received February 14, — Read February 17, 1842. 
These remarkable bodies have been an object of much interest since their disco- 
very by the great anatomist whose name they bear. Malpighi found they could be 
injected with great facility from the arteries, and he imagined them to be glands, in 
which the urine is elaborated from the blood. He seems also to have been of opinion 
that in them the uriniferous tubes take their rise*. Ruysch examined them with 
great care, and preserved specimens in his museum in which he believed that he had 
shown, by injection, that in them the arteries are continuous with the tubes'^. 
This was the principal ground for the famous, but now exploded theory, of the ex- 
istence of exhalant arteries with open mouths, which in the secreting glands opened 
directly into the excretory canals. It is probable that this accurate observer mistook 
the efferent vessel of the Malpighian body for a uriniferous tube, for the efferent 
vessels of those Malpighian bodies that lie near the medullary part of the kidney, take 
the same course as the tubes, and are often large enough to be readily mistaken for 
them. The statement, however, of Ruysch and others;};, that the tubes may be in- 
jected from the arteries, is true, though in a different sense from that in which they 
understood it. 
Schumlansky^, some years afterwards, entertained more complete views of the 
connection between these bodies and the uriniferous tubes, and he has even given an 
ideal diagram of this connection, which shows that he had a very clear conception of 
the fact. From a considerable error, however, in the proportion of these bodies to 
the tubes (represented in his figure), it has been suggested that his description could 
not have been drawn from nature; a censure that seems to have been little merited. 
* See his chapter “ de intends glandulis renalibus, earumque continuatione cum vasis,” a work not less con- 
spicuous for the sterling accuracy of its observations than for the sagacity displayed in the reasonings based on 
them. 
t “ Quarum (gland. Malpigh.) nonnullae hie dissolutse, in ductus Bellinos degenerant.” — Ruyschius, The- 
saurus Anat. x. No. 86. “ Corpuscula rotunda et glandiformia in totum sunt dissoluta et extricata. Ductus 
qui dicuntur Bellini, in totum quoque repleti sunt propter repletionem arteriolarum.” — Ibid. No. 149. 
X Barnardus Albinus, after injecting the Malpighian bodies from the arteries, “vasa urinse exinde prode- 
untia eodem colore farta beatus conspexit.” — Albinus, p. 63, 64. Vide Schumlanskii Dissert. Inaug. Ana- 
tomicam de renum structura. Argentorati, 1782, p. 69. 
§ ScHUMLANSKY, Op. tit. 
MOCCCXL1I. 
I 
