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ON THE ORIGIN OF THE LYMPHATIC SYSTEM 11

Bright faith has met with knowledge and the two
Shine clear against your sweet, unruffled calm,
As the blue sky, wide-stretching here above,
Sets off the gleaming ball and shining cross,
Including both, showing their beauty forth,
But ever with its own wide, tender, blue,
Touching the heart with peace unspeakable.

ANNA THERESA KITCHEL.

ON THE ORIGIN OF THE LYMPHATIC SYSTEM

Naples Table Association Prize Essay.

The history of our knowledge of the lymphatic system can be divided into three periods. The first begins in 1622 with the discovery of the lacteals. Aselli, an anatomist at Pavia, was dissecting a live dog before a group of friends in order to study the movements of the diaphragm, when to his surprise, on spreading out the mesentery he saw it covered with white cords. These he took to be nerves, but soon found his mistake, and recognized the lacteals as vessels for absorption.

The new discovery did not quickly make headway, for in the first place it was not in accord with the teachings of Galen, and in the second place the full force of the opinion of Harvey was thrown against it. However, in about thirty years the fact that the lacteals are the absorbants from the intestine, and that they empty into the thoracic duct, which in turn opens into a vein in the neck, was firmly established.

A new discovery, made in 1651, namely that there are general lymphatics, or those which carry lymph and not chyle, ushered in the second period. For the next hundred and eighty years those who worked on the lymphatic system were occupied. in tracing the distribution of the lymphatics to the different parts of the body, for example to the skin and to the various organs.

During the third period, which began about fifty years ago, attention has been turned mainly to the lymph glands. It had been noted that there were small bean-shaped bodies along the course of the lymph ducts, but the structure of these bodies could not be determined before the microscope came into use. Both in the study of Comparative Anatomy and of disease, a

knowledge of the origin of a system embryologically forms a basis for further study. For example, the morphology of the arterial system was placed upon a satisfactory basis with the aortic arches in different animals. But on the other hand, the numerous investigations on the lymphatic system have left our knowledge of its morphology in a very unsatisfactory state. Such main questions as the relation of the lymphatics to the tissue spaces, the development of the lymphatic ducts, and their relation to the serious cavities are in such a vague state that the opinion of no two investigators approach agreement.

On the medical side many profound questions are connected with the lymphatic system. The study of inflammation, of tuberculosis, of cancer, of blood formation and blood diseases demands further knowledge of the lymphatic system.

It has been held as a theory, though not demonstrated, that the lymph ducts arise from tissue spaces which become dilated by the fluid that exudes from the blood vessels; that a number of such dilated spaces situated along certain lines flow together to form ducts which subsequently open into the veins.

As a matter of fact, the lymph ducts bud off from the veins in four places and grow over the surface of the body. The small blood vessels, as has been known for some time, bud off from the larger ones in a similar way, but with this difference: The blood vessels grow out at right angles, so that there is a free flow of blood into them from the start, while the lymph ducts grow out parallel to the blood vessels, so that the fold of tissue between makes a valve which prevents the back flow of blood into the lymphatic.

In early embryological life the veins are large and can return all the blood to the heart with ease, but these large veins mean a sluggish flow of blood and consequent poor nourishment. Hence the veins become smaller and thicker walled, while a new set of ducts, the lymphatics, grows out, designed to bring back the fluid exuded from the veins. They are then modified blood vessels to carry the blood plasma without its corpuscles. Such a simple system is found in the amphibia and reptilis; in birds and mammals glands develop along the ducts, and all the lymph must pass through them before it enters the veins.

FLORENCE SABIN.

W. E. HENLEY'S IDEALS

It falls to the work and personality of some men to have an interest over and beyond that which is strictly intrinsic, because in them certain typical though perhaps merely contemporary moods are strikingly bodied forth. This is certainly true of Stevenson. Just as Matthew Arnold lets us into the secret of a high-minded, very intellectual stoicism, which was in fashion, may-be, thirty years ago, so Stevenson represents that reactionary school of youth which is still making authors by the dozens. There have been some signs of late that Stevenson's generation itself is passing into that retrospective stage where it is possible to criticise its ideals. But much of its inspiration is still very active at the present, and invites study, not so much in Stevenson, perhaps, as in the work of his friend, Henley. For the ideals with which Stevenson started out were destined to much modification before the end, while they were those for which Henley's aggressive personality stood very picturesquely and very doggedly from first to last. Henley was a force, perhaps on account of his limitations. He gave himself to a few ideas, and so the enthusiasm which he brought to them carried. His was a literary influence that cannot be measured by his general popularity, because it won him disciples among the young men of letters, who in their turn popularized his ideals by working in the literary atmosphere which they had created. Of course it is always possible to doubt how many of Henley's "school" were his own creation, or just how many were the product of those contemporary influences which made the man himself what he was. Still Stevenson owed much to Henley undoubtedly, just as both owed to Whitman and Browning and Meredith; while a poem by Henley, which describes the romance of a whirling train as it sweeps the lover to the beloved (written as early as 1876), shows that the older man had anticipated the inspiration of some of Mr. Kipling's most vigorous modern lyrics. Henley's "Song of the Sword", dedicated to Kipling, proclaims his own recognition of kinship with the younger man.

Henley's cult was confessedly the cult of youth. In the early seventies the intellectual world found itself to use no more

solemn adjectives-prematurely old and bored. Disillusioned is the description of Darwin's generation. There was little in the scientific materialism of the day to feed romantic youth; yet romantic youth undoubtedly survived in spite of French naturealism and the English ethical school. In Fleeming Jenkins Stevenson has described the college youth of his day, who grew up on Darwin and Spencer, and whose scientific atheism was as much a matter of course as was strict orthodoxy once upon a time in New England. This was the generation to which Henley wrote the lyric (which has stood the test of a wonderful amount of repetition):

"Out of the night that covers me,
Black as the Pit from pole to pole,
I thank whatever gods may be

For my unconquerable soul.”

The closing affirmation, "I am the master of my fate, I am the captain of my soul," had a cheering sound to any number of young men who were seriously in doubt whether indeed they had any soul, or whether scientific determinism had left them any free will to direct it. Judged by just the intellectual mood which produced this vigorous poem, it rings truly like a moral battle-cry. It is the insurrection of the lost individual against the unknown, crushing powers of a hostile universe. And yet as voicing the spiritual faith of the saints, it is doubtless lacking in humility, reverence and love. This presumptuous challenge to the Deity has perhaps less justification to-day than it had thirty years ago. Perhaps Henley himself had moments of a wistful sense of its insufficiency as time went on, and personal loss broke in part the spirit of the man.

"Poor windlestraws

On the great, sullen, roaring pool of Time

And Chance and Change, I know,"

he says, in the touching cry of his bereaved fatherhood. He would no more admit the right of the heart to claim its desire for a reality than Huxley, who wrote after his child's death : "Had I lived a century earlier, I could have fancied a devil scoffing at me and asking me what profit it was to have stripped myself of the hopes and consolations of the mass of mankind. To which my only reply was and is, 'O devil! truth is better than much profit.'" And yet in Henley's generous and loving tribute to R. A. M. Stevenson, there are these

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significant sentences: "He was what I have said; and there was in him a something mystical which I, who was long as close to him as his shirt, never quite fathomed. Whatever it be worth, he died in the glory of an unalterable Belief." That 'something mystical" is certainly gaining on the present generation as a possible fact-not the mere illusion of the heart. To name only James' brilliant "Varieties of Religious Experience" is to show the way scientific thought is tending, toward a more and more substantial faith in that intangible something which we call "the other world."

Henley and his contemporaries, however, proposed to meet the imaginative dryness of a mechanical theory of the universe with a sort of romantic naturalism of their own. They set about restoring charm to life by restating all its natural irrefutable joys. The sensational life, the immediate excitements of action and of passion were what Henley was always proclaiming and what Stevenson embodied so effectively in "Virginibus Puerisque." "Times change, opinions vary to their opposite," says Stevenson, in his dedication of the book to Henley, "and still this world appears a brave gymnasium, full of sea-bathing, and horse exercise, and bracing manly virtues. Our affections and our beliefs are wiser than we; the best that is in us is better than we can understand; for it is grounded beyond experience, and guides us, blindfold but safe, from one age to another." This romantic naturalism of Stevenson and Henly was a sort of revived religion of primitive man.

The perfectly fundamental character of sex, which was one of the two main articles of Henley's creed, was after all proclaimed by Whitman, and Browning and Meredith in Henley's own century. But it finds very imaginative, and often very beautiful expression in such poems as the last of the London Voluntaries. Sometimes it proves a humorous inspiration, as in one of the Rhymes beginning:

"As like the Woman as you can,
("Thus the New Adam was beguiled"),

or in a paragraph on George Eliot, which is worth quoting as a specimen of Henley's style when dealing with his pet animosities. "It is thought that with George Eliot, the Novel with a Purpose had really come to be an adequate instrument for the regeneration of humanity. It was understood that Passion

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