Search -
The Hand, Its Mechanisms and Vital Endowments
The Hand Its Mechanisms and Vital Endowments Author:Charles Bell Purchase of this book includes free trial access to www.million-books.com where you can read more than a million books for free. This is an OCR edition with typos. Excerpt from book: There can be no greater contrast to these bones than is presented in the skeleton of the bat. In which their hands are assisting, in throwing aside the e... more »arth. M. u conformation of the head in shape and strength of bones, and the new adjustment of a muscle, which is cutaneous in other animals (the Platisma Myoides) to the motions of the head, arc among the most curious changes nf common parU to new office?. that animal the bones are light and delicate; and whilst they are all marvellously extended, the phalanges of the fingers are elongated, so as hardly to be recognized, obviously for the purpose of sustaining a membraneous web, and to form a wing. Contemplating this extraordinary application of the bones qf the extremity, and comparing them with those in the wing of a bird, we might say, that this is an awkward attempt—a failure. But before giving expression to such an opinion, we must understand the objects required in .this construction.— It is not a wing intended merely for flight, but one which, while it raises the animal, is capable of receiving a new sensation, or sensations in that exquisite degree, so as almost to constitute a new sense. On the fine web of the bat's wing, nerves are distributed, which enable it to avoid objects in its flight, during the obscurity of night, when both eyes and cars fail. Could the wing of a bird, covered with feathers, do this 1 Here then we have another example of the necessity of taking every circumstance into consideration before we presume to criticise the ways of nature. It is a lesson of humility. In the next page we have a sketch of the arm bones of the Ant-eater, f to shew once more the correspondence in the whole extremity. We observe these extraordinary spines of the humerus marking the power of the muscles which ...« less