On the intimate structure of bone, as composing the skeleton in the four great classes of animals, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes : with some remarks on the great value of the knowledge of such structure in determining the affinities of minute fragments of organic remains / by John Quekett.

  • John Thomas Quekett
Date:
[1846]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: On the intimate structure of bone, as composing the skeleton in the four great classes of animals, mammals, birds, reptiles, and fishes : with some remarks on the great value of the knowledge of such structure in determining the affinities of minute fragments of organic remains / by John Quekett. 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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    understood, and a minute fragment would have sufficed for this pur- pose. Before coming, however, to the immediate object of this paper, it will be necessar}' that I point out to you briefly the different parts of which a bone may be said to consist; and, as there are many members of our small community who do not practise the healing art, and have not, therefore, made the intimate structure of the animal body their ])arlicular study, T trust that, by a slight description, I shall be enabled to render the subject of which I am about to treat perfectly intelligible to all. Every bone may be said to consist of two parts, a hard and a soft ]3art: the hard is composed of carbonate and phosphate of lime, and of carbonate and phosphate of magnesia, deposited in a cartilaginous or other matrix ; whilst the soft consists of that matrix, and of the peri- osteum which invests the outer surface of the bone, and of the medullary membrane which lines its interior or medullary cavity, and is conti- nued into the minutest pores. If we take for examination a long bone of one of the extremities, say a femur, of a human subject, or of any mammalian animal, we shall find that it consists of a body or shaft and two extremities : if a vertical section of such a bone be made, we shall also find that the middle of the shaft contains a central cavity, termed the medullary cavity, which extends as a canal throughout the whole of it, or else is entirely or partially filled up with a cellular bony structure, which cells are termed cancelli, and the structure a cancellated structure. On a more careful examination of the bony substance or shaft, we shall find it to be slightly porous, or rather oc- cupied, both on its external and internal surfaces, by a series of very minute canals, which, from their having been first described by our countryman Clopton Havers, are termed to this day the Haversian canals, and serve for the transmission of blood-vessels into the interior of the bone. Further than this we cannot proceed in our investiga- tion without optical assistance; but if now a thin transverse section of the same bone be made, and be examined by the microscope with a power of 200 linear, we shall see the Haversian canals very plainly, and around them a series of concentric bony laminte, from three to ten or twelve in number. If the section should consist of the entire circle of the shaft, we shall notice, besides the concentric lamina around the Haversian canals, two other series of laminae, the one around the outer margin of the section, the other around the inner or medullary cavity. Between the laminae is situated a concentric ar- rangement of spider-like looking bodies, which have, by different authors, received the names of osseous corpuscles, calcigei'ous cells,