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A troop of observers soon entered upon the study of the nerves, and the leader here, as in so many other lines of microscopical research, was no other than Theodor Schwann. Through his efforts, and with the invaluable aid of such other workers as Remak, Purkinje, Henle, Muller, and the rest, all the mystery as to the general characteristics of nerve tracts was cleared away.
Not even the most daring speculation or brilliant guess work in physiology engaged them as material. Thus Henle, the great anatomist, calmly affirmed that these glands "have no influence on animal life: they may be extirpated or they degenerate without sensation or motion suffering in the least."
Hitherto the cause of contagion, by which certain maladies spread from individual to individual, had been a total mystery, quite unillumined by the vague terms "miasm," "humor," "virus," and the like cloaks of ignorance. Here and there a prophet of science, as Schwann and Henle, had guessed the secret; but guessing, in science, is far enough from knowing.
It was now for the first time that a true general anatomy became possible. As early as 1816 Treviranus had attempted to resolve the tissues, of which Bichat had admitted no less than twenty-one, into their simple microscopic elements. How could such an attempt succeed, Henle well asks, at a time when the most extensively diffused of all the tissues, the areolar, was not at all understood?
Caught by hook, 12th May, 1841. No. 54. Native name, MATCHET. "Common blue shark" of the settlers. Specimen four feet and a half long; have been seen longer. A female had four young alive when taken. Spiracles behind the eyes. Caught by hook, 16th August, 1841. No. 26 CESTRACION PHILIPPI, Mull. and Henle. Native names, MATCHET, KORLUCK, or QUORLUCK. "Bull-dog-shark" of the sealers.
I get every year those very elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner volumes of, I suppose, 400 pages altogether and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology only abstracts of them!
It is true that Henle made a general theory as to the relation of such organisms to diseases, and pointed out the logically necessary steps in a demonstration of the causal connection between any organism and a disease. It is true also that a general theory of the production of ail kinds of fermentation by living organisms had been advanced. But all these suggestions made little impression.
I get every year those very elaborate reports of Henle and Meissner volumes of, I suppose, 400 pages altogether and they consist merely of abstracts of the memoirs and works which have been written on Anatomy and Physiology only abstracts of them!
Of course various other workers at once disputed Schwann's claim to priority of discovery, in particular the English microscopist Valentin, who asserted, not without some show of justice, that he was working closely along the same lines. Put so, for that matter, were numerous others, as Henle, Turpin, Du-mortier, Purkinje, and Muller, all of whom Schwann himself had quoted.
The decade that followed that discovery was a time of great activity in the study of microscopic organisms and microscopic tissues, and such men as Ehrenberg and Henle and Bory Saint-Vincent and Kolliker and Rokitansky and Remak and Dujardin were widening the bounds of knowledge of this new subject with details that cannot be more than referred to here.
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