Excerpt from A Text-Book of Human Physiology: Designed for the Use of Practitioners and Students of Medicine

IN preparing the first edition of this work, published about five years ago, I hoped that my experience as a practical physiologist and public teacher and the discipline of eleven years during which I was occupied in writing my large treatise in five volumes might enable me to make a book which would meet the wants of practitioners and students of medicine. My expectations in this regard have been more than fulfilled. My work has been very favorably received by the profession; it is extensively used as a text-book, and two very large impressions of the first edition and a second edition, published in 1879, have been exhausted. Encouraged by the favorable reception of the book, I have spared no pains in its revision for a third edition. I have rewritten certain portions, carefully corrected all the errors and inaccuracies that I have been able to discover, and have eliminated here and there statements that did not seem to me to be fully in accord with the existing state of physiological knowledge. In addition to minor corrections, I have made the following important alterations: I have adopted the views of Bowman, lately confirmed by the experiments of Heidenhain and others, with regard to the functions of the Malpighian bodies of the kidney. The section upon Animal Heat has been entirely rewritten and I have given an account of my new experiments upon this subject, published in 1879, showing the probable generation of heat in the body by the union of oxygen and hydrogen and the formation of water. I have introduced a short description of the cerebral convolutions, with a new diagram, and a brief account of the recent discovery by Boll, of retinal red. I have also added a diagram illustrating the mechanism of micturition, and a figure, kindly prepared for me by Dr. E. G. Loring, of New York, showing the appearance of the fundus of the eye as seen with the ophthalmoscope.

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