Long Life, Short Art

§. III.

(c) De tranſp. Sanct. 424.

(d) Hal. in Boerh.

As for the paths, they are the so-called exhaling vessels, offspring of the arteries, which are disseminated through the entire skin in such innumerable quantity and such subtlety that not even Leeuwenhoek original: "Lövenhekius" made them visible with his lenses. Rather, he concluded from the analogy of other minutiae, which he had magnified with the microscope, that 125,000 similar pores lie open outward in the space of one grain of sand. (c) Furthermore, cutaneous excretions occur from follicular machines, called glands, opening through ducts into the skin. These are miliary glands, arranged above the fat, perforating the wonderful net of Malpighi, transmitting humor through hollow, elevating valves. These are accompanied by ampullar, unctuous follicles, fashioned from the epidermis drawn inward (d), called sebaceous glands, providing an occasion for many defilements of the skin. Moreover, that an exhalation of spirits occurs from the final nerves is proven, besides other reasons, by this one alone: that a debility arises from too increased and long-protracted insensible perspiration, which could hardly be conceived and explained without an immediate exhaustion of the nerves.

§. IV.

A century ago and more, the very useful work of Conrad Victor Schneider on the pituitary membrane and on catarrhs was published. He solidly demonstrates that the defluxions called by the ancients, and by the vulgar, do not originate from the brain or its parts, such as the ventricles or the wedge-shaped and sieve-like bones, but from the stasis of lymph thickening through delay in the pituitary membrane of the interior of the head, investing the sides of the rough artery trachea, the palate, and the bronchi. Behold the argument of Sanctorius regarding the perspirable! While this is exercised constantly, the aforementioned membrane will not be vexed by more abundant lymph, and catarrh is banished.

§. V.

Two centuries ago, Hieronymus Mercurialis reclaimed from the ruins of the ancients the gymnastic art for preserving bodies and defending them from diseases, and left it to posterity.