Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/26

 follicles, which the modern method of puncture can claim as being eminently its own attainment; for many years ago—in 1784, in fact—and three years before the appearance of Mascagni's splendid work, with similar figures and histories of similar experiments (Vasorum Lymphaticorum Historia et Iconographia, 1787), the continuity of the lacteal radicles upon the walls of the intestine with the 'lymph-paths'—to borrow a word of later coinage—in the mesenteric glands, and finally, after passing through successive lines of these apparently solid structures, with the thoracic duct itself, had been demonstrated by Sheldon, then Professor of Anatomy in our Royal Academy of Arts. These are his words (from p. 49 of his work, Of the Absorbent System, 1784), describing his plate No. 5, a copy of which I have had made and suspended here: 'In the fifth plate of this work, upon a portion of human jejunum from an adult female subject, seventeen lacteal vessels are injected with quicksilver, by inserting pipes into them upon the intestine. They were remarkably large and varicose in this subject,