ventured to call the alphabet of the body.

But just as in language certain diphthongs and syllables are frequently
recurring, so we have in the body certain secondary and tertiary
combinations, which we meet more frequently than the solitary elements
of which they are composed.

Thus A B, or a collection of cells united by simple structureless
solid, is seen to be extensively employed in the body under the name of
cartilage. Out of this the surfaces of the articulations and the springs
of the breathing apparatus are formed. But when Nature came to the
buffers of the spinal column (intervertebral disks) and the washers of
the joints (semilunar fibrocartilages of the knee, etc.), she required
more tenacity than common cartilage possessed. What did she do? 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