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Distribution of finest nerve fibres which result from the division of dark-bordered nerve fibres to the elementary muscular fibres of the thin mylo-hyoid muscle of the hyla,or green tree frog The diameter of each muscular fibre is less than that of a human red blood corpuscle. The capillaries are injected blue.

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XI.

AUTOMATIC AND INFLUENTIAL NERVES.

PRELUDE ON CURRENT EVENTS.

IT is sometimes sneeringly affirmed that colleges teach little but the art of finding where knowledge is; and yet that is a great and difficult art. In the froth-oceans of weak books, it is a high service to point out to a hurried man, on any interesting theme, the most serviceable volumes. What are the dozen best English, and what the dozen best German books on biology? In response to many inquiries, verbal and written, let me attempt an answer to this rather formidable question. There are few or no good books on biology older than 1860. Remember that the microscope did not attain its power to furnish facts of a scientific character for the basis of research till 1838. So fast has the study of living tissues progressed, that it may be said that all the conclusions. reached before 1860 either have been or will be modified. I therefore can recommend to you nothing older than 1860, except an author or two like Schleiden and Schwann, who began the investigations of living tissues, and whose works are to be examined for their interest as historical documents. On this

theme, as on so many other philosophical matters, the best books are German; but take first the English in the order of their merit:

1. Beale, Dr. Lionel S., " Protoplasm; or, Matter and Life." Third edition: London, G. & A. Churchill; Philadelphia, Lindsay & Blackiston, 1875.

The style of this work is attractive for its clearness, grace, and force, and occasionally for a keen, logical humor. It is not always that a physician has literary capacity; but Lionel Beale is a good and almost a brilliant writer. Besides, he has had a liberal training in logic and metaphysics, and seems to have grasped philosophy as a whole very fully. But the charm of his book is in the luminousness, vivacity, and power produced by his stalwart grasp of his theme as an original discoverer. No doubt he has added more to the knowledge of living tissues than any living English author within the last twenty-five years. It does not become me to state here what precautions I have taken to know that I have not been misled in seeking authorities on biology; but I have taken precautions of a most merciless sort, and continue to take them, and all my precautions end in giving me more and more confidence in Beale as a man of candor and sense as well as of science. If you can buy the productions of but two authors on biology, purchase the works of Beale as the best that the English language offers you, and those of Frey as the best that the translated German at present affords.

2. Frey, Professor Heinrich, Zurich, "Manual of

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