On the Movement of Animals, Part One

PROPOS. II.

That the muscle does not differ from flesh.

The error of the ancients must now be rejected; for they distinguish the muscle from the flesh and think the muscle to be an aggregate of tendinous fibers; but the flesh to be something superadded and different from the fibers, namely, to be a villous mat encrusted with blood, investing those tendinous fibers. They prove this with such an argument: because in animals that are severely emaciated, or dead from hunger, the fibrous muscles themselves become very thin and fleshless, and the muscles of healthy animals, if they are crushed with rods, pressed, and scraped, similarly remain as thin fibers in them, no differently than in those emaciated and killed by hunger.

But if I am not mistaken, this does not prove that flesh is something different from muscular fibers, because whether the fibers are emaciated or not, if they are washed many times with water, they always appear white with the help of a microscope and of a similar tendinous consistency, and no mat appears on them; indeed, in the very fleshy muscles themselves, which they think to be encrusted with that fleshy mat, the fibers themselves appear of the same consistency and formed with the same columnar figure, in the same way as in muscles washed with water; as is to be seen in muscles that have been boiled or cured with salt.

It is true, however, that that thinness and subtlety of the fibers in the emaciated or compressed can depend on the defect of the nutritious juice, which was filling the porosities of the fibers, as happens in dried sponges and in the dried leaves of trees, in which the mat does not fail, but only the juice, which previously filled the spongy cavities;