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 628 growths are attributed to the injuries he had received in pugilistic encounters. One more curiosity and we have done with the show specimens of the museum. Here is the lower jaw of an ancient Roman, with the stains on one of the molar teeth of the obolus, or small copper coin, placed in his mouth, as Charon’s fare to carry him over the Styx: as the coin evidently remained in between his teeth, we must conclude he was too late for the ferry.

We have been trifling, however, with the mere toys of this magnificent collection; the real scientific gold of the museum is to be found in the little army of uninviting-looking bottles which line the walls from the ground-floor upwards. The Pathological museum, the first room we enter, contains a history of disease written upon the different organs and tissues of the human body itself. We do not stop to dwell upon mere curiosities here, but mark the methods by which this mortal frame is gradually sapped and destroyed; or how nature wrestles with the destroyer, and sometimes repairs the ravages he has committed. Amid the immense mass of preparations, it is rather difficult to single out examples of the vis medicatrix naturæ; but as we pass, we may notice the contrivances by which our great mother sets about her work. 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. Again, be a witness of the manner in which it gets over the difficulty of a stoppage in a blood-vessel. Here is the example of the femoral artery, the great highway of blood in the thigh, having been tied by the surgeon. If, by these means, an impediment to the circulation in the lower limb had occurred, the limb would have died. But nature makes provisions for such accidents, and carries the blood, as we see in this specimen, through some small collateral channel, which gradually accommodates itself to the increased work put upon it, and becomes a large vessel. When Fleet Street is stopped up by gas or water companies, the tide of human life is turned along some back street, until it finds the great thoroughfare clear again; so it is with the main conduits which convey the sanguineous tide in the human body.

Unhappily, however, nature is not always successful in this fight with disease; nay, in the majority of cases her exertions are painfully feeble, and but too often the destroyer has proceeded from the first with unconquerable steps, and human life has appeared to form a passive framework on which it builds its monstrosities. Look, for instance, at that example of elephantiasis, or the leg and thigh of a woman, pretty nearly as large as the shaft of a Doric column; or inspect that cabinet of wen-like tumours in which the whole nutritive process seems to have gone through life to support and inflate enormous growths, until at last the human fabric appears only to be a dwindled and accidental appendage to the dominant balloon-like tumour. If we would still continue our survey of the sad mischances to which poor humanity is subject, let us glance at the curious skeleton in which all the bones are anchylosed, or knotted together by osseous growth, so as to be tied into a perfectly immobile knot. Again, we may see bones so brittle that they fly to pieces on the least strain, like the glass toy known as a Prince Rupert’s drop, or arteries so solidified that in life they must have clasped and stifled in their solid grip the labouring and heaving human heart. We might fill pages with details of morbid specimens of unutterable value to the scientific man, but which we fear would only impel the more curious visitor to turn aside from these articles to more congenial topics.



