Synopsis of the physiological series in the Christ Church Museum : arranged for the use of students after the plan of the Hunterian collection, and chiefly under the divisions of the Hunterian catalogue.

  • Christ Church (University of Oxford). Anatomical Museum.
Date:
1853
Catalogue details

Licence: Public Domain Mark

Credit: Synopsis of the physiological series in the Christ Church Museum : arranged for the use of students after the plan of the Hunterian collection, and chiefly under the divisions of the Hunterian catalogue. 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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    life may be of a very simple kind; viz. a membranous spheroid, containing a fluid; and as among Animals we can discover a progressive advance from an absence of consciousness towards the higher mental endowments with which Man is gifted, so a progressive increase of complication may be traced in their material organization. In the higher kinds of Animals special structures are provided, for seizing, swallowing, digesting, and assimilating the food ; for absorbing the useful parts of it, and rejecting the useless, circulating the fluid so prepared to all parts, for the purpose of nourishing them; for purifying this fluid, by contact with the air, and by rejection of chemical substances redundant or hurtful to it; and for separating or secreting chemical products for further use in the economy; all these being parts of the nutritive process. The organs connected with Reproduction, Voluntary Motion, and the exercise of their Senses and Mental Powers, are equally complex and distinct. In Unicellular Animals, these processes of Nutrition, as well as those of Reproduction, Locomotion, and -whatever capacity for receiving impressions, sensations, or perceptions the being may possess, is performed by its simple organization ; i. e. a Cell with its contents. Thus the student will observe the progressive complication in the structure of each individual organ in the same way that he notes that of the structural arrangements of the whole being, and he must note the extent and kind of changes which the organs of the higher Animals undergo in the course of the development of their Embryos. 4th. The highest purpose of classification may be said to be, to represent in the easiest method the truest and most complete picture of the objects classified; the most like being necessarily brought before the mind together, after a full determination of their real likeness to each other; and a sub- ordinate but important end is to make it practicable readily to ascertain the assigned name, if it has been described, and so all the known recorded circum- stances of the object in question. In all classification of Animals, those species are placed nearest each other which are supposed to resemble each other more than they resemble any other species; and the value of the classification will depend on the perfection with which this likeness has been determined. The great primary groups of the animal kingdom have been formed on resemblances and differences in the Nervous System, assuming that whereas