Culebra

“ He must prove that he could pitch winning base-ball. But a fellow who had earned a place for himself on the gold roll, and then found a fine position for his father, and moved the whole family from Wolverton, ought to face the heaviest hitters of the Culebra nine with a good deal of confidence in himself. ”

“ Interpreters skilled in many tongues are as much needed as in the police courts of New York. A code of laws has been put in force, to take the place of the clumsy and cruel old Spanish laws we found when we came to the Isthmus. A penitentiary at Culebra contains such prisoners as are not working on the roads. If a convict breaks jail, there is no place for him to run to, for on each side of the Canal Zone stretches almost unbroken jungle, and there is a Zone policeman standing at the gangway of every steamer. ”

“ Imagining a war between us and some one European naval Power, and imagining a war also between us and two or three allied European naval Powers, and realizing the length of our Atlantic and Gulf coasts, extending from Maine to Panama, a glance at the map shows us that, apart from the home naval bases on our continental coasts, the position on American soil which is the closest to European bases is on the little island of Culebra, which occupies a salient in the northeastern end of the Caribbean Sea. ”

“ Twenty cents an hour isn't much down here, but it sounds big alongside that four-dollar-a-week job hi the hardware store."
Then he discovered that to discuss the better position which he had not yet secured was to raise hopes that sounded fantastic. Those rival ball-players from Culebra might knock him out of the box in the first inning. This would mean good-by to Major Glendinning's favor. Base-ball cranks were fickle and uncertain persons. Walter therefore merely informed the family that the climate agreed with him and he was sure his judgment had been sound in coming to the Isthmus. ”

“ Cuvier asserts of the Mosasaurus that before he had seen a single vertebra, or a bone of any of its extremities, he was enabled to announce the character of the entire skeleton, from the examination of the jaws and teeth alone, and even from a single tooth. The power of doing this results from those magnificent laws of co-existence, which form the basis of the science of comparative anatomy, and which give the highest interest to its discoveries. ”

“ Cuvier, in his elaborate and beautiful dissections of the Mollusca, has demonstrated that this important organ is mainly composed of an immense multitude of muscles, circular, longitudinal, and transverse, wonderful in their complexity and arrangement, but most perfectly adapted to impart variety, force, and precision to its movements. In these respects the human tongue perhaps presents the closest parallel to its organization. It is remarkable that at its upper or basal part it is hollow, and encloses some of the viscera of the body. ”

“ According to Cullen, all the solids in the human body are either simple or vital. The simple solids retain, after death, the properties which they possessed during life. But the vital solids, which form the fundamental part of the nervous system, are marked by properties, which disappear directly death occurs. ”

“ In those earlier days of which I am speaking, all the points of minute anatomy were involved in obscurity. Some found globules everywhere, some fibres. Students disputed whether the conjunctiva extended over the cornea or not, and worried themselves over Gaultier de Claubry's stratified layers of the skin, or Breschet's blennogenous and chromatogenous organs. The dartos was a puzzle, the central spinal canal a myth, the decidua clothed in fable as much as the golden fleece. ”

“ We can hardly imagine any stronger proof of the Unity of Design and Harmony of Organizations that have ever pervaded all animated nature, than we find in the fact established by Cuvier, that from the character of a single limb, and even of a single tooth or bone, the form and proportions of the other bones, and condition of the entire Animal may be inferred. ”

“ Cuvier compares the areas of the cranium and face sawed vertically on the median line from before backward; according to this measurement, the area of the former in the highest races is four times that of the face, in the negro the area of the face being one fifth larger. The norma verticalis of Blumenbach measures the breadth of the skull and the projection of the face, and consists in viewing skulls from behind and above, the eye being fixed on the vertex of each. ”

“ Radiates have ill-defined nervous and muscular systems, and in their lowest forms possess the animal functions without the animal organs.
This well-rounded classification of animal forms is in a sense the crown of Cuvier's work, for the principle of the subordination of characters, in the interpretation which he gives to it, is a direct application of his principle of functional correlation. Each of the great groups is built upon one plan. The idea of the unity of plan has become for Cuvier a commonplace of his thought, and it is tacitly recognised in all his anatomical work. ”

“ These pathological principles of Cullen are contained in his First Lines of the Practice of Physic, an extremely popular book, often reprinted and translated. More importance is to be attached to his Nosology or Classification of Diseases. The attempt to classify diseases on a natural-history plan was not new, having been commenced by Sauvages and others, and is perhaps not a task of the highest importance. Cullen drew out a classification of great and needless complexity, the chief part of which is now forgotten, but several of his main divisions are still preserved. ”

“ Cuvier observed, the hand of Nature has prepared for us these very experiments without that drawback. The animal series, as we advance upward from its lowest members, proves to us what is the effect of the addition of new parts in succession to a nervous system, as also does any individual thereof in its successive periods of development. It is one of the most important discoveries of modern physiology that, as respects their nervous system, we can safely transfer our reasonings and conclusions from the case of the lowest to that of the highest animal tribes. ”

“ Their breathing organs open near the tail, but are not produced into the long respiratory tube by which the Culex larva can be so easily recognized. They possess the most marvellous arrangements on the head for setting up currents conveying food to the mouth, and, in fact, they afford one of the most charming objects of ‘animated nature’ that one could desire to watch. ”

“ It is of itself an extraordinary fact, without reference to other considerations, that the order adopted by Cuvier, in his animal kingdom, as that in which the four great classes of vertebrate animals, when marshalled according to their rank and standing, naturally range should be also that in which they occur in order of [308] time. The brain which bears an average proportion to the spinal cord of not more than two to one, came first,—it is the brain of the fish; that which bears to the spinal cord an average proportion of two and a half to one succeeded it,—it is the brain of the reptile ”

“ In an instant the sluggish waters are in turbulence and foam, the whole form of the Colubra is in motion, its huge and rapid coilings soon encircle the struggling victim, and but a short moment elapses, ere every bone is broken in the body of the expiring prey. ”

“ The mouth leads into the oesophagus, which extends straight down the body nearly to the aboral end or “ampulla,” where it dilates into a stomach, from which the ascending limb of the U-shaped alimentary canal passes directly to the anus. The coelomic body-cavity is divided by a transverse septum (fig. 3, 5) which lies near the bases of the tentacles. The praeseptal or lophophoral coelom is continued into each of the tentacles and into the epistome. ”

“ Harvey says to Riolanus:—
"For the present I will only say and set forth without demonstration—by good leave of the learned and with due respect to the ancients—that the heart, as the beginning, author, source, and origin of everything in the body and the first cause of life, should be held to include the veins and all the arteries and also the contained blood; just as the brain, including all its nerves and sensory organs and spinal marrow, is the one adequate organ of sensation, as the phrase is. ”

“ Be it noted, the receptive cells of the sense organs are immersed [Pg x] in fluid, and each sense organ is specifically sensitive, i.e. only to that form of energy which it has been evolved to receive through countless ages of evolution.
The nervous system is composed of myriads of nerve cells, and of nervous fibres, which are long and exceedingly slender processes of these cells formed of similar substance, each shielded and insulated by a double coat. The nerve cells and the nerves are arranged in an ordered plan which has been unravelled by ingenious methods. ”

“ Embryology, or development, was always neglected by Cuvier and his school, being blind to the fact that embryology must play an important part in philosophie anatomique. This fruitful field of research was left for Wolff, Vicq-d'Azyr, Von Baer, and others.
It has already been stated that comparative anatomy was the basis of Cuvier's zoology, and there are numerous and voluminous memoirs of his on the subject from 1795 to 1831—the year before his death. ”

“ That on the outside is a thin, white, elastic membrane, called the cuticle, or scarf skin; that on the inside is a strong membrane, denominated the cutis, or true skin; between these two is a very thin membrane, to which anatomists have given the name rete mucosum, and in which is situated the substance which gives color to the animal. The cutis is composed of fibres, which run in every direction, and, being by far the thickest layer, is the one that is converted into leather.
6. The skins of large animals, such as those of the ox and horse, are denominated hides ”

“ It consists of a compact gland-like organ, containing a much coiled tube, ciliated for the greater part of its length, but deprived of cilia in its last coils; this latter part—or duct—leaves the "gland" and pierces the body-wall, opening to the exterior at the base of the parapodium. The ciliated canal passes forwards into the next segment, where it opens by a funnel into the coelom. The lip of the funnel is extremely curious, for the cells constituting it are drawn out into very long, delicate processes covered with cilia. [307]
Fig. ”

“ Hence the teleological argument for Cuvier's first diagnostic character—the presence in animals of an alimentary cavity, or internal pocket, in which they can carry about their nutriment, has broken down—so far, at least, as his mode of stating it goes. And, with the advance of microscopic anatomy, the universality of the fact itself among animals has ceased to be predicable. Many animals of even complex structure, which live parasitically within others, are wholly devoid of an alimentary cavity. ”

“ For form harmonises with all the organisation of an animal; and every organised body, Cuvier observes, over and above the common qualities of its tissues, has a peculiar form, not only generally and exteriorly, but even down to its minutest details ”

“ The reproductive organs of both males and females of Cunina proboscidea are said to produce, besides the usual distinctively sexual elements, neutral amœboid germ cells, which wander into the endoderm of the stomach and circular canal, and also penetrate into the gelatine of the subumbrella. ”

“ The reproductive organs (Figure 4, Sheet 20, g.) are masses of cells situated in an isolated part of the coelom in the atrial folds, and, having no ducts, their contents must escape into the atrium by rupture of the body-wall. Thence they escape either by gill-slits, pharynx and mouth, or, more generally, through the atrial pore. The animals, like all the vertebrata, are dioecious, i.e., male or female. ”

“ For the Doubly Symmetrical type his name is the better of the two; for Cuvier’s name of Vertebrates alludes only to the backbone,—while Baer, who is an embryologist, signifies in his their mode of growth also. He knew what Cuvier did not know, that in its first formation the germ of the Vertebrate divides in two folds: one turning up above the backbone, to inclose all the sensitive Organs,—the spinal marrow, the organs of sense, all those organs by which life is expressed ”

“ The parallelism which exists between the course of creation, as exhibited in the animal kingdom, and the classification of the greatest zoologist of modern times, is perhaps still more remarkable. Cuvier divides all animals into vertebrate and invertebrate; the invertebrates consisting, according to his arrangement, of three great divisions,—mollusca, articulata, and radiata; and the vertebrates, of four great classes,—the mammals, the birds, the reptiles, and the fishes. ”

“ The body gradually lengthens, and becomes enlarged at its upper extremity; from this portion of the animal four arms appear surrounding a kind of mouth. The arms lengthen, and are soon joined by four others. These organs, as also the inner surface of the lips and of the stomach, are covered with cilia, and become highly sensitive. They are used in the same manner as the tentacula of the Actiniæ, namely, for the capture of food. ”

“ Cubebs, are hot and dry in the third degree, they expel wind, and cleanse the stomach of tough and viscous humours, they ease the pains of the spleen, and help cold diseases of the womb, they cleanse the head of flegm and strengthen the brain, they heat the stomach and provoke venery. ”

“ Therefore, it is probable that the filaments and the veins and then the vesicle and at length the heart, having organs destined to receive and retain the blood, are made for the sole purpose of transmitting and distributing it, and that the blood is the principal part of the body....
"Therefore, relying with certainty upon what I have observed in the egg and in the dissection of living animals, I maintain against Aristotle that the blood is the primary generative part; and that the heart is its organ, destined to send it on a circuit. ”