PREFACE.
I have inserted some reflections on the membranes in the memoirs of the Medical Society. They were the abridgement of a larger work, on which I was desirous of consulting the opinion of the learned before their publication.
Some men, for whose judgment I have great respect, received them with an interest, which encouraged me to publish the present work. No one has hitherto engaged in a like enterprise, though medicine and physiology may derive from it decisive advantages. The real chasm which it seems to me to fill, the different experiments it contains, whence I believe useful results may arise, some views suited perhaps to elucidate the theory of the vital powers and of their sympathies, a number of new anatomical facts here laid open, will justify me, I hope, with the learned, in loading a science with one more treatise, on which so much has already been written, and from which there is doubtless more to be retrenched, than now remains to be added.
