Anatomy Quotes

The painter who is familiar with the nature of the sinews, muscles, and tendons, will know very well, in giving movement to a limb, how many and which sinews cause it; and which muscle, by swelling, causes the contraction of that sinew; and which sinews, expanded into the thinnest cartilage, surround and support the said muscle.

The function of muscle is to pull and not to push, except in the case of the genitals and the tongue.

The human foot is a masterpiece of engineering and a work of art.

The eye, the window of the soul, is the chief means whereby the understanding can most fully and abundantly appreciate the infinite works of Nature; and the ear is second.

The senses are of the earth, the reason stands apart from them in contemplation.

The eye encompasses the beauty of the whole world.

I have found that, in the composition of the human body as compared with the bodies of animals, the organs of sense are duller and coarser. Thus, it is composed of less ingenious instruments, and of spaces less capacious for receiving the faculties of sense.

Because, if it were all-pervading and the same in every part, there would have been no need to make the instruments of the senses meet in one centre and in one single spot; on the contrary it would have sufficed that the eye should fulfil the function of its sensation on its surface only, and not transmit the image of the things seen, to the sense, by means of the optic nerves, so that the soul - for the reason given above - may perceive it in the surface of the eye.

But she puts into them the soul of the body, which forms them that is the soul of the mother which first constructs in the womb the form of the man and in due time awakens the soul that is to inhabit it.

This work should commence with the conception of man, and should describe the nature of the womb, and how the child inhabits it, and in what stage it dwells there, and the manner of its quickening and feeding, and its growth, and what interval there is between one stage of growth and another, and what thing drives it forth from the body of the mother, and for what reason it sometimes emerges from the belly of its mother before the due time.

And this network of veins acts in man as in oranges, in which the peel becomes thicker and the pulp diminishes the more they become old. And if you say that as the blood becomes thicker it ceases to flow through the veins, this is not true, for the blood in the veins does not thicken because it continually dies and is renewed.

The frog retains life for some hours when the head the heart and all the intestines have been taken away. And if you prick the said cord it instantly twitches and dies.

That cause which moves the water through its springs against the natural course of its gravity is like that which moves the humours in all the shapes of animated bodies.

Then you shall make a discourse on the hands of each animal in order to show how they vary, as in the bear in which the ligaments ofthe tendons of the toes of the foot are connected over the neck of the foot.

To compare the bone structure of the horse with that of the man you should show the man on tiptoe in representing the legs.

The frog instantly dies when the spinal cord is pierced; and previous to this it lived without head without heart or any bowels or intestines orskin; and here therefore it would seem lies the foundation of move- ment and life.