A main cause of discordant views on the structure of the muscular fibril / by Martin Barry.
- Martin Barry
- Date:
- 1853
Licence: Public Domain Mark
Credit: A main cause of discordant views on the structure of the muscular fibril / by Martin Barry. Source: Wellcome Collection.
Provider: This material has been provided by The Royal College of Surgeons of England. The original may be consulted at The Royal College of Surgeons of England.
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![a the particles are flat. Sucli flattened particles I sketched in Muller’s Archiv for 1850*^ and reproduce the sketch in fig. 3. In now proceeding to point out the ways, in one or more of which I think it possible that such a line may pass into a spiral form, I would ask a reference to drawings I gave from nature in 1842, after a long-continued examination of the elements of fibre at the earliest periodf. For I presume that no one will say that what was seen of the earliest formation of fibre may not be ap- plied in endeavours to throw some light upon its mode of repro- duction. Those drawings show spirals to arise out of piles of particles having a ring-like form. The rings were met with and repre- sented arranged in three ways, viz. 1st, in a single pile, as in fig. 6 A; 2nd, arranged in alternate or overlapping order, as in fig. 6 B; 3rd, connected like links of a chain, as in fig. 6 C. Bings arranged in all these ways were found in piles; and rings arranged in all these ways were seen passing into spirals J. 1 further showed the existence of such bodies as that in fig. 6 D §, an altered ring, which if produced must pass into some form of spiral. When each ring of the first arrangement. A, assumes the form D, union of the extremities of a pile of bodies such as D forms a single spiral, and this by longitudinal division passes into two, as in fig. 6E|1. When, according to the second ar- rangement, the rings overlap each other, as in fig. 6 B, or, according to the third arrangement, are connected, as at C, the imion of the extremities of a pile of such bodies as that at D is attended with interlacement, forming at once the twin spiral E. [Of this twin spiral a drawing from nature (Heart of Frog) is seen in fig. 7. It represents neither full contraction nor com- plete relaxation, but four intermediate states; and these were seen at difierent parts of the same fibril. As the two spirals run in the same direetion, i. e. as they are parallel, I have been accustomed latterly to term this fibril, and indeed all organic fibre, a twin spiral^.—In all three of the arrangements I showed the rings to have become segmented, as in fig. 7-| b, an appear- ance of course familiar to all accustomed to examine the elements of tissues. The segments intimate the formation of the particles ♦ Taf. XVII. fig. 29. t Phil. Trans. 1842, plate 7> figs. 45 to 48. I Phil. Trans. 1842, plates 6 and 7, figs. 31-33, 47, 48. § Phil. Trans. 1842, plates 5, 6 and 11, many figures. II Fig. 6 E rej)resents an apparatus for constructing a model of the twin sj)iral muscular fibril, to be explained further on. ^ I had previously called it a double spiral; but this seems not so fully to iin])ly that the direction of the two spirals is the same. [Originally I believed their directions to be difiTerent, but corrected the error in Jluller's Archiv for 1850, and in the Phil. Mag. for 1852.]](https://iiif.wellcomecollection.org/image/b22367676_0004.jp2/full/800%2C/0/default.jpg)
