The anatomy and physiology of the human body / by John and Charles Bell.
- John Bell
- Date:
- 1829
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: The anatomy and physiology of the human body / by John and Charles Bell. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library at Emory University, through the Medical Heritage Library. The original may be consulted at the Woodruff Health Sciences Center Library, Emory University.
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![in the Museum of the College of Surgeons of Edin- burgh which specimens I took from the wounded at Corunna and at Waterloo. It is probably owing to the looser texture of the extremities of the long bones that true necrosis does not take place in them, but only in the diaphysis. Some, with a singular unhappiness of disposition, | will contemplate the chain of animal existence, and see in it only a mechanical principle of adherence to a certain original type or model; and they have ' more gratification in giving a catalogue of things useless (that is to say, of parts, the beauty or useful- ness of which they do not comprehend), than of con- templating the whole, and allowing their minds to receive that natural influence which the system of nature is calculated to produce. The four divisions of the upper extremity exist in all the anterior extremities of the class mammalia. A curious inspection of the gradations will prove that parts dissimilar in form, are a new appropriation of the same bones. In the fin of a whale we may recognize the bones of the human hand. Strip the integuments off the anterior fin of the dolphin or porpoise, and we recognize, somewhat disordered, a scapula, humerus, fore-arm, and carpus, metacarpus, and finger bones. It should surprise us less, that in the wing of a bird we should see the bones of the anterior extremity of a quadruped ; or recognize, in the fine bones which stretch the membraneous wing of a bat, the phalanges of the fingers. Although there be no resemblance betwixt the outer form of animals that walk, and those that fly, and i those that creep, yet in all of them the skeleton is ] recognizable as the same system of bones, variously modified. But the question returns upon us,—can there be an adaptation of parts better calculated to their end, or more obviously designed, or better evidence of a system pervading all nature, and that the whole has been cast out at once from a power omnipotent ?](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b21036986_0057.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
