Not only has little been added to the catalogue of parts, but some things long known had become half-forgotten.  Louis and others confounded the solitary glands of the lower part of the small intestine with those which “the great Brunner,” as Haller calls him, described in 1687 as being found in the duodenum.  The display of the fibrous structure of the brain seemed a novelty as shown by Spurzheim.  One is startled to find the method anticipated by Raymond Vieussens nearly two centuries ago.  I can hardly think Gordon had ever looked at his figures, though he names their author, when he wrote the captious and sneering article which attracted so much attention in the pages of the “Edinburgh Review.”

This is the place, if anywhere, to mention any observations I could pretend to have made in the course of my teaching the structure of the human body.  I can make no better show than most of my predecessors in this well-reaped field.  The nucleated cells found connected with the cancellated structure of the bones, which I first pointed out and had figured in 1847, and have shown yearly from that time to the present, and the fossa masseterica, a shallow concavity on the ramus of the lower jaw, for the lodgment of the masseter muscle, which acquires significance when examined by the side of the deep cavity on the corresponding part in some carnivora to which it answers, may perhaps be claimed as deserving attention.  I have also pleased myself by making a special group of the six radiating muscles which diverge from the spine of the axis, or second cervical vertebra, and by giving to it the name stella musculosa nuchaee.  But this scanty catalogue is only an evidence that one may teach long and see little that has not been noted by those who have gone before him.  Of course I do not think it necessary to include rare, but already described anomalies, such as the episternal bones, the rectus sternalis, and other interesting exceptional formations I have encountered, which have shown a curious tendency to present themselves several times in the same season, perhaps because the first specimen found calls our attention to any we may subsequently meet with.

The anatomy of the scalpel and the amphitheatre was, then, becoming an exhausted branch of investigation.  But during the present century the study of the human body has changed its old aspect, and become fertile in new observations.  This rejuvenescence was effected by means of two principal agencies,—­new methods and a new instrument.

Descriptive anatomy, as known from an early date, is to the body what geography is to the planet.  Now geography was pretty well known so long ago as when Arrowsmith, who was born in 1750, published his admirable maps.  But in that same year was born Werner, who taught a new way of studying the earth, since become familiar to us all under the name of Geology.