Outlines of comparative anatomy, presenting a sketcxh of the present state of knowledge of the progress of discovery, in that science. Designed to serve as an introduction to animal physiology, and to the principles of classification in zoology / By Robert E. Grant ... Containing part first, organs of relation or of animal life, and part second, organs of vegetative or organic life.

  • Grant, Robert E. (Robert Edmond), 1793-1874.
Date:
1841
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Outlines of comparative anatomy, presenting a sketcxh of the present state of knowledge of the progress of discovery, in that science. Designed to serve as an introduction to animal physiology, and to the principles of classification in zoology / By Robert E. Grant ... Containing part first, organs of relation or of animal life, and part second, organs of vegetative or organic life. Source: Wellcome Collection.

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    peritoneum, and suspended freely in the cavity of the abdo¬ men, to allow of greater motion of the vertebral column with safety, where there is yet no fixed sacrum. They have a deeply lobulated or folded structure, consisting of a long series of flat imbricated tortuous transverse lobes, or regular sinuous folds of their exterior tubulated portions, resembling externally so many small kidneys pressed closely together. The contorted and convoluted tubuli composing each of these lobes, pour their thick white viscid secretion, consist¬ ing chiefly of uric acid, by a single orifice into the common ureter, without forming a pelvic enlargement, and without the calices developed in the more concentrated forms of the kidneys of mammalia. The narrow tubular ureters follow along the inner margin of the kidneys, receiving successively the short wide common ducts of all the separate lobes, and open by distinct orifices into the back part of the cloaca, as in other oviparous ver- tebrata, whether provided with, or destitute of, a urinary bladder; sometimes, however, a small vesicular dilatation is formed on each ureter before it opens into the cloaca. The blood-vessels penetrate from the exterior of the kidneys between the lobes, and appear to have been mistaken by Huschke for tubuli uriniferi ramifying through the lobes. The affinity of the anguine serpents to saurian reptiles, so obvious in most parts of their structure, is seen also in the presence of a urinary bladder in these species, which is of considerable size in the pseudopus ; and the two short kidneys of the anguis are placed on the same transverse plain of the body, as in higher reptiles. The small white tortuous tubuli uriniferi preserve the same size and diameter throughout the substance of each lobe, and the same tortuous diverging course to their periphery, so that there is yet no distinction of cortical and medullary portions of these organs, as is seen in the kidneys of mammalia. In the long narrow kidneys of the embryo, the tubuli are short, cylindrical, and straight, and extend separately from the ureter, through the soft blastema, with little regularity in their arrangement or in their course; they commence in the embryo earlier than the suprarenal capsules, near to the cloacal end of the trunk, on the dorsal side of the corpora Wolffiana, as two narrow white opaque bands of blastema, along the inner edges of which, the ureters and the rudimentary tubuli make their