Long bone

“ They become gradually converted into bone, and as bony processes, they remain separated for a time from the principal piece, by an intervening soft substance, which for the time being glues them to the shaft of the long bone. There are portions also on the ribs, where they hinge upon the spine, which at the age of eighteen have only commenced to develope from soft material into bone, and their mysterious transformation is not completed till the twentieth year of life. ”

“ Bones make the body stiff and strong, and give it shape. Long bones reach through the arms and legs, and little bones reach down the fingers and toes. Rounded plates of bone form the head, and a pile of bony rings makes up the backbone. Each bone is built to fit exactly into its own place and to do its own work. In all there are over two hundred bones in the body. ”

“ In the long bones, the compact texture has a very remarkable thickness in the centre, where it serves the triple purpose, first of protecting the medullary organ, of which it is the covering, then of giving solidity to the bone in this place, which more than the extremities, is exposed to great efforts in locomotion, falls, concussion, &c. and where the bone, traversed only by some very weak fibres of the cells, cannot borrow its resistance but from its external parietes ”

“ A long bone consists of a shaft and two extremities. The shaft is a hollow cylinder within which is the medullary canal. The extremities are somewhat expanded for the purpose of articulation, and to afford a broad surface for the attachment of muscles. The long bones are as a rule curved in two directions to give greater strength to the bone. Some examples of this class of bone are the clavicle, radius, ulna, humerus, femur, tibia, fibula, metacarpal, metatarsal, and the phalanges. ”

“ You see the larger part at the end is full of little holes, like a sponge. This makes it light and strong. There is a hollow place in long bones filled with marrow. It also fills the spongy parts. Marrow is made of fat and cells.
You must not think that live bones look like one which has been lying out-of-doors a long time. Live bones are full of blood and have a pinkish color. They also have an outside skin, which can be peeled off, as you see in this picture.
A bone with the outside skin partly peeled off.
Amy: What are the bones made of?
[Pg 29]
End of a bone sawed open. ”

“ Even a long bone, from one articulating surface to the other, may be removed; the metacarpal bone of the thumb, and the metatarsal bone supporting the great toe, may, for example, be taken away in their whole extent. ”

“ Where there are two parallel bones—as in the leg, for example—the growth of the diseased bone may be impaired, and the other continuing its normal growth becomes disproportionately long; less frequently the growth of the diseased bone is exaggerated, and it becomes the longer of the two. ”

“ The skeleton begins as a continuum, and a continuum it remains all life long. The things that link bone with bone, {713} cartilage, ligaments, membranes, are fashioned out of the same primordial tissue, and come into being pari passu, with the bones themselves. The entire fabric has its soft parts and its hard, its rigid and its flexible parts; but until we disrupt and dismember its bony, gristly and fibrous parts, one from another, it exists simply as a “skeleton,” as one integral and individual whole. ”

“ The massive intermaxillary bone had its posterior margin of an angular form, and into the notch thus formed there was wedged the anterior end of a long strip of plates, which expanded as they approached the occipital part of the cranium, and terminated in three irregular plates that may represent the place of the parietal and occipital bones. ”

“ A bone tied in a knot, after the earthy matter has been removed by an acid.
In very old people the bones contain more earthy matter, and they break easily. Grand ́fa-ther and grand ́moth-er must be careful not to fall, for if they break a bone it will take a long time to heal.
When we take a baby, we should not lift him by his arms, and we must hold him so his bones will not grow out of shape. ”

“ Again the stiff wing blow; but this time his jump was higher; one claw gripped the shoulder, tore its way through flying feathers to the bone, while his weight dragged the big bird down. Then Quoskh shortened her neck in a great curve. Like a snake it glided over the edge of her own wing for two short, sharp down-thrusts of the deadly javelin—so quick that my eye caught only the double yellow flash of it. ”

“ Long bones, like the humerus and femur, are suited to giving strength, form, and stiffness to certain parts, while irregular bones, like the vertebræ and the pelvic bones, are fitted for supporting and protecting organs. Others, like the wrist and ear bones, make possible a peculiar kind of motion, and still others, like the ribs, are adapted to more than one purpose. The vast differences in shape, size, structure, and surface among the various bones are but the conditions that adapt them to particular forms of service in the body. ”

“ In the flat bones, the compact texture forms two external layers, the thickness of which is between that of the middle of the long bones, and that of the extremity of the same bones, or that of the short ones. ”

“ This longitudinal fracturing of the long bones of the leg is not known to occur in any mammalian remains which belong to a period previous to that where we have evidence of the existence of {137} the human race; and these broken bones afford evidence of the occurrence of man, who, for the purpose of obtaining the marrow, divided them in the direction most available for this object. ”

“ Good examples of their work are seen in the hollows of the long bones. We know, of course, that the bones in a child’s leg are so much smaller than those in the leg of an adult that they could almost be fitted into the hollows of the latter. ”

“ The Bone-setter extends and flexes, twists and rotates it, until the patient can endure it no longer; and thinking that all must certainly be right after so much agony, he attempts to use the limb—his morbid sensibility has been overcome by the manipulations—he puts his foot to the floor, and, to his own astonishment, he finds he can walk. ”

“ The face group, consisting of fourteen bones, provides cavities and supports for the different organs of the face, and supplies a movable part (the inferior maxillary) which, with the bones above (superior maxillary) , forms the machine for masticating the food.
Fig. 100—The skull (Huxley) . The illustration shows most of the bones of the skull. 3. The Thorax.—This group contains twenty-four bones of similar form, called ribs, and a straight flat bone, called the sternum, or breastbone (Fig. 101) . ”

“ We may well reckon up Fifteen distinct Parts, which are the Bone, the Cartilage, the Ligament, the Tendon, the Membrane, the Fibre, the Nerve, the Vein, the Artery, the Flesh, the Fat, the Skin, the Scarf-Skin, the Hair, and the Nails.
What is a Bone?
It is the hardest and driest Part of the whole Body, and that which constitutes its principal Support. ”

“ Here, for instance, is a preparation of a mortified foot. See how nature has set to work, and entrenched herself against the further spread of death. The living and the blackened portions of flesh seem divided as if by a sharp knife, and across this gap death cannot leap. Or note again this diseased bone, and the delicate way in which the reparative process is to be seen building up a new framework of osseous matter within it. ”

“ Let us now come, at last, to the mechanical structure of bone, of which we find a well-known and classical illustration in the various bones of the human leg. In the case of the tibia, the bone is somewhat widened out above, and its hollow shaft is capped by an almost flattened roof, on which the weight of the body directly rest. ”

“ It is this which makes the bones so hard and firm that they do not bend by the weight of the body. When we are young, the bones have less of this bone-earth, and so they bend easily, and readily get out of shape. When we get old, they contain so much bone-earth that they become more brittle, and often break very easily.
20. A person's height depends upon the length of his bones. The use of alcohol and tobacco by a growing boy has a tendency to stunt the growth of his bones, so that they do not develop as they should. ”

“ The short, square, and flattened bones of the body, such as those of the wrist, the skull, and the hips, instead of being hollow inside are spongy; and the spaces in the bone-sponge are filled with a soft tissue called the red marrow in which new red and white corpuscles for the blood are born, to take the place of those which die and go to pieces. ”

“ When we remember the pliant condition of young bone and the manner of its growth at the epiphyses, how easy it is to imagine the advantage of regularly stretching the cartilage in the lines of the most serviceable shape and position of the future bone! ”

“ The broken extremities of the bones become intimately united by bony matter passing from one to the other. The mass of new bone on the outside, formed by the ossification of the callus, being no longer wanted, is absorbed; by degrees the whole of it disappears, and the bone is left having the same dimensions which it had before the occurrence of the accident.
The process of union is completed in young persons sooner than in those advanced in life; in the upper extremities sooner than in the lower; and in smaller animals more speedily than in man. ”

“ Town, City.—Repeat the sign for "house" a number of times, moving the hands here and there or from side to side.
Things.—Placing the right "&" hand over toward the left, palm up, draw it toward the right, dropping the hand continuously.
Bone (or anything hard like porcelain, etc) .—Strike the front teeth with the end of the forefinger of the right hand.
Dish.—Sign for "bone," then with the ends of the hands together draw them toward self in a curve, bringing the heels together and thus indicating the round shape of a dish. ”

“ A skull here—a rib there—bones scattered about as the wild beasts left them after the horrible feast. The clean-picked skull grins and stares—every bone and scattered lock of hair has its story of a tragedy. ”

“ The outside of the bones is hard, but the inside is soft and hollow. Where there is a joint between two bones, there is a coating of marrow, which may be regarded as a soft bone. The teeth, too, are to be counted among the bones. ”

“ Let us first examine the skeleton. In youth many parts of the skeleton are soft and flexible, like the gristles and cartilages, which join the ribs to the breastbone, but in the old man they are replaced by bone. ”

“ Hence the bones of children are tough, are not readily fractured, and when broken easily heal again; [Footnote: This is only one of the many illustrations of the Infinite care that watches over helpless infancy, until knowledge and ability are acquired to meet the perils of life.] while those of elderly people are liable to fracture, and do not quickly unite.
FIG. 3. [Illustration: A thin slice of Bone, highly magnified showing the lacunæ, the tiny tubes (canaliculi) radiating from them, and four Haversian canals, three seen crosswise and one lengthwise.] ”

“ Thus bones are not dry, lifeless substances, but are the very type of activity and change. In life they are richly supplied with blood from the nutrient artery and from the periosteum, by an endless network of nourishing canals throughout their whole structure. Bone has, therefore, like all other living structures, a self-formative power, and draws from the blood the materials for its own nutrition. ”

“ I have taken the sternum bone from a dead man’s chest, analyzed it, then brought together similar elements, placed them in a mould, and I have produced a bone which was just as real as the one with which I started. ”

“ A bone, he says, may be split longitudinally like a piece of wood, or it may be broken transversely or obliquely, and its ends may be blunt or sharp, which last variety is the worst of all, as they cannot be easily made to unite with the other parts, and are apt to wound the muscles and nerves. Sometimes the bone is broken into fragments, and [429] in certain bones a fragment is occasionally separated entirely from the broken bone.
The Arabians, especially Avicenna, Haly Abbas, and Albucasis, adopt the terms used by our author. ”

“ A Weak Navicular Bone.—When the disease commences first in the bone—and there is no denying the fact that sometimes, although not invariably, it does—it may be explained by attributing to the structure of the bone an abnormal weakness in build. ”

“ THE STRUCTURE OF THE BONES—When a bone is sawed lengthwise, it is found to be a compact shell filled with a spongy substance This filling increases in quantity, and becomes more porous at the ends of the bone, thus giving greater size to form a strong joint, while the solid portion increases near the middle, where strength alone is needed. ”

“ Bone essentially surrounds the nervous mass. The skull environs and incloses the brain, the vertebræ the spinal cord, the ribs, the visceral nerves the snail's shell all the soft parts of that animal, the coral stem its polyp-tube, the horny coat the insect.
1832. The purest and highest antagonisms in an animal are nerve and bone, and as such they are demonstrated on every occasion. The nerve is that which is soft, powerless, changeable, sentient, governing, and motion-imparting; the bone, what is hard, strong, unchangeable, non-sentient, governed, and becoming moved ”