The determination of the influence of the eyeball on the growth of the orbit, by experimental enucleation of one eye in young animals / by W. Ernest Thomson.

  • Thomson, William Ernest Francis.
Date:
[1898]
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: The determination of the influence of the eyeball on the growth of the orbit, by experimental enucleation of one eye in young animals / by W. Ernest Thomson. Source: Wellcome Collection.

Provider: This material has been provided by The University of Glasgow Library. The original may be consulted at The University of Glasgow Library.

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    friend Dr. Leslie Buchanan, who has helped me greatly at the operations and otherwise, to have removed the brains from these skulls in order to trace the atrophied fibres. But so much damage was done to the skull in the only case in which the experiment was tried, that this idea was abandoned. I will now show you the skulls, both wet and dry, and also the skulls of two control * rabbits about the age a1 which these others were operated on (see Plates). The anophthalmic orbit is smaller than its fellow in nearly all, if not in quite all, directions. I have made measurements (in millimetres) of both the wet and dry skulls as carefully as I could, but, of course, such measure- ments cannot be looked upon as absolutely accurate. Some of them are not even attempts at absolute measurement, but these are, relatively speaking, fairly correct as regards the comparison of the two sides. These measurements have all been put into tabular form (see Tables I, II, and III). It was especially difficult to estimate the depth of the orbit, because the lower orbital margin on the anophthalmic side seems to be slightly nearer the middle line than that of the normal side (Fig. 7), and cannot therefore be taken as an accurate fixed point relatively to the orbital depth. You will, however, probably agree with me that, apart from actual measurements, the curve of the orbital floor is encroached upon all round, forming as it were the surface of a smaller sphere than that of the normal side (Figs. 10 and 11). Eegarding the tabulated figures as a whole, one is struck by the frequent occurrence of the figure 2 and a fraction as expressing the difference between the chief normal and anophthalmic measurements of the bones in the dry state. Look at Table II, where the three heads 3,4, and 5 have been measured after maceration. In the anteroposterior direction the differences between the two sides are 3, \ and 2-8, average 2'3. In the vertical, 29, 2-2, and * The control skulls are not included amongst the plates.