What
does man do in a similar case of need? I need hardly tell you. The
mason lays his bricks in simple mortar. But the plasterer works some
hair into the mortar which he is going to lay in large sheets on the
walls. The children of Israel complained that they had no straw to make
their bricks with, though portions of it may still be seen in the
crumbling pyramid of Darshour, which they are said to have built. I
visited the old house on Witch Hill in Salem a year or two ago, and there
I found the walls coated with clay in which straw was abundantly
mingled;--the old Judaizing witch-hangers copied the Israelites in a good
many things. The Chinese and the Corsicans blend the fibres of amianthus
in their pottery to give it tenacity. Now to return to Nature. To make
her buffers and washers hold together in the shocks to which they would
be subjected, she took common cartilage and mingled the white fibrous
tissue with it, to serve the same purpose as the hair in the mortar, the
straw in the bricks and in the plaster of the old wall, and the amianthus
in the earthen vessels. Thus we have the combination A B C, or
fibro-cartilage. Again, the bones were once only gristle or cartilage, A
B. To give them solidity they were infiltrated with stone, in the form
of salts of lime, an inorganic element, so that bone would be spelt out
by the letters A, B, and Y.

If from these organic syllables we proceed to form organic words, we
shall find that Nature employs three principal forms; namely, Vessels,
Membranes, and Parenchyma, or visceral tissue. The most complex of them
can be resolved into a combination of these few simple anatomical
constituents.

Passing for a moment into the domain of PATHOLOGICAL ANATOMY, we find the
same elements in morbid growths that we have met with in normal
structures. The pus-corpuscle and the white blood-corpuscle can only be
distinguished by tracing them to their origin. A frequent form of
so-called malignant disease proves to be only a collection of altered
epithelium-cells. Even cancer itself has no specific anatomical element,
and the diagnosis of a cancerous tumor by the microscope, though
tolerably sure under the eye of an expert, is based upon accidental, and
not essential points,--the crowding together of the elements, the size of
the cell-nuclei, and similar variable characters.

Let us turn to PHYSIOLOGY. The microscope, which has made a new science
of the intimate structure of the organs, ha