Report on the progress of human anatomy and physiology in the year 1844-5 / [Sir James Paget].

  • James Paget
Date:
1846
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Report on the progress of human anatomy and physiology in the year 1844-5 / [Sir James Paget]. Source: Wellcome Collection.

    37/64 (page 37)
    lower animals, namely, in the cells of the seminal filaments of Polyclinum stel- latum, and in large cells in the sprouting arms of a young medusa-like radiate animal. Cenires of Nutrition. Mr. Goodsirf believes that the theory which he liolds^ of the existence of germinal spots” in the secreting glands, i. e. of “ a number of points from which acini are developed as from so many centres,” may be extended to the process of development and nutrition of all the organs and textures. In an obscure exposition of his theory, he calls the points whose office corresponds to that of the germinal spots in glands, the “ centres of nutrition,” of the several textures. Each of these centres he considers to be “a cell, the nucleus of which is the permanent source of successive broods of young cells which from time to time fill the cavity of their parent, and then carrying with them the cell-wall of the parent, pass off in certain directions and under various forms, according to the texture or organ of which the parent forms a part.” He names that a “ germinal membrane,” in which “ the nutritive or germinal centres are arranged at equal or variable distances, and in certain directions in the substance of a fine transparent membrane.” Such a membrane, identical with that which Mr. Bowman has named the basement-membrane, forms the tubules of glands, and the secreting epithe¬ lium is situated on its inner surface ; its nuclei are the germinal spots, or cen¬ tres of nutrition. “A germinal membrane is occasionally found to break up into portions of equal size, each of which contains one of the germinal cen¬ tres showing that it “consists of cells with their cavities flattened, so that their walls cohering at their edges form the membrane, and their nuclei re¬ main in its substance as the germinal centres.” The secondary cells de¬ veloped from the germinal spots or nutritive centres of such a membrane are always attached on its free surface ; they are at first contained between the two layers of the membrane, (these two layers being formed by the opposite walls of its component cells,) and when fully developed they carry forward the superficial layer, leaving the nuclei or germinal centres in the substance of the posterior or deeper layer in contact with the blood-vessels. The theory is illustrated by the example of serous membranes.§ Their germinal membrane is the layer immediately below the epithelium. It does not, in general, show the lines of jnnction of its component flattened cells. These, its cells, appear to be elongated in the form of ribands ; their nuclei, or the germinal spots, being also elongated, expanded at one end, elongated at the other, somewhat bent, and directed, in general, parallel to the subja¬ cent blood-vessels, in the neighbourhood of which they are most numerous. These flattened riband-shaped scales or cells, and the bright crystalline nuclei, appear identical with Henle’s nucleus-fibres. (In aged and inflamed serous membranes, they appear to break up into areolar tissue). It is assumed that the nuclei are the sources of all the [epithelium] scales of the superficial layer of the serous membrane, each being the source of those in a certain compartment of its own ; and that, in the development of these epithelium- scales, the necessary nutritive material passes from the blood in the adjacent capillaries to the several centres, from each of which the scales of a com¬ partment derive their origin and their nourishment, till they are detached. Again, another example is referred to in the bones ; || in which, as already stated, the mass of soft cells in each bone-corpuscle is considered to be the nutritive centre or germinal spot for all the cells within the range of the ca- naliculi of that corpuscle. * Entwick. der Cephalopoden, p. 150; in Reichert’s Jahresbericht, u. s. p. 171; and in Schleiden u. Nageli’s Zeitschr. u. s, p. 101. t Anatomical and Pathological Researches ; Edinb. 1845, p. 1. t L. c. p. 29, and Trans. Roy. Soc. of Edinburgh, 1842. § L. c. p. 41. || L. c. p. 65.