A lecture on the red corpuscles of the blood of vertebrates : with some remarks on man's place in nature.

  • Gulliver, George, 1804-1882.
Date:
[1868]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: A lecture on the red corpuscles of the blood of vertebrates : with some remarks on man's place in nature. 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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    or reptilian character in that paradoxical creature, the Lepidosiren, or;Mud-fish, of Western Africa. No anatomist now, after examining simply the red corpuscles of the Whale and Ornithorhynchus, could for a moment think of degrading the one to a fish, or the other to a bird; nor, observ- ing the great similarity of these corpuscles in birds, fail to perceive in this single fact an exponent of the remarkable uniformity of the general organization of this class. In conclusion, we are led back to the grand declaration of our illustrious countryman, Harvey ; that the blood is the priraogenial part of the body, where the Lares and Penates of Life are enshrined—the immediate and chief seat of the vegetative faculties of the animal—the first part to live and the last to die of this our wondrous microcosm. I may add, too, as the child is more worthy than the cradle, so is the blood more worthy than the parts that merely contain or defend it, and that the Red Corpuscles have now been proved to occupy a most eminent place in the organic func- tions of the vertebrate animal. And yet as to these researches we are often still pestered about “ cui bono ?” more “ analogies” and “homologies ?” wider “ generalizations ? ” As if the uninquiring mind can expect to see the good of anything beyond its own know- ledge; as if the study of difference, now so sadly neglected in anatomy, as Lord Bacon, too, complained was the case in his time, were not as important and more difficult than that of resemblance ; and as if, of late years, in the present state of science, “ knowing only in part,” we have not had some rather too sweeping generalizations—a sort of new Age of Reason: — “No end, in wand’ring mazes lost: ****** Yain wisdom all, and false philosophy.”