Page:The Hunterian Oration 1839.djvu/39

32 THE HUNTERIAN ORATION. the germs of discoveries yet to be made in medicine and its collateral sciences. Had the hint been caught and duly appreciated that was given by the sagacious Hippocrates, practical medicine would, centuries ago, have profited by the addition of the ear to the other senses in the investigation of disease; for, as Laennec has candidly avowed, it was from Hippocrates the first notion of the practice of auscultation was derived.* So with respect to one of the most interesting announcements recently made in anatomical science, the curious and beautiful arrangement of tubes and fibres in the bone and enamel of the teeth, it would appear to be but the re-discovery of facts which were recorded by Leeuwenhoeck more than a hundred and sixty years ago in the Transactions of our Royal Society. And, with respect to some curious phenomena manifested through a portion of the nervous system, the spinal marrow, recently engaging the discussions of our physiologists, it would appear that the original, but unnoticed mention of these phenomena exists in


 * Laennee—Diseases of the Chest—Introduction, page 4.

+ Microscopical Observations of the Structure of Teeth and other Bones, made and communicated in a letter by Mr. Anthony Leeuwenhoeck. Philosophical Transactions, 1678, “ We plainly saw that the whole tooth was made up of very small, straight, and transparent pipes.” One point Leeuwenhoeck certainly did leave for discovery by the modern microscopic observer, namely, the six-sided figure of the fibres in the enamel of the teeth, so interesting

as the contrivance for packing the largest number of fibres into the smallest space, and thus providing for the density of the enamel. �