Table I

Beginning from the top a group of lobes of adipose tissues can be seen, three of which are observed through the microscope; the latter are a plastic rencostruction of picture 19 of “Observation sur la structure primitive du corps animals” by Abbot Felice Fontana and show the images ‘Filamentoso-Reticolari’ that had such great importance, from the XVll to the XIX century, in microscopic anatomy.

There follows an artery and its branches, which has on one side an aponeurosis with its ramifications of the artery inserted and, on the other, the wall of a great artery dissected into its three layers. Below we can see the proximal part of a macerated tibia whose medullary cavity is open; from this follows a nerve plexus under which is a ganglion-cell. In the centre we can find a muscular venter with its tendon and its detached fascia put upside down.

Below is a gland in which the excretory ducts can be seen; to the side of the last one a lymph node can be seen, with all its incoming and outgoing lymphatic vessels, that is very similar to those pictured on the Tables of Paolo Mascagni’s Universal Anatomy and on whose surface images ‘FilamentosoReticolari’ can be seen. After the muscle one can see a vein with its tributaries open to show in the inside the ‘valves of Fabrizio D’Acquapendente'; to the side a connective sheet with injected veins can be found.

At the top, between the vein and the muscles, are four small cylinders whilst another one is below the vein; they are small nerves seen as through a microscope just as Fontana represented them on the Table Ill of his Traite sur le venin de la vipere; the different striping on them, on the first transversal and on the latter longitudinal and partly wavy, is related to the fact that, as demonstrated by Zanobio1 and later confirmed by both Clarke and Bearn and Ushiki,2 microscopical observation of fresh nerves had been done with reflected and transmitted light, respectively.

At the bottom, between the vein and the muscles, the microscopical image of a nerve with all the fibres that compose it, separated one from the other, is easily visible; this therefore illustrates the great discovery of the nervous fibre due to Felice Fontana.

Under the nerve with longitudinal striping we can also see the microscopic view of a flattened nerve and that of a nerve dismantled in all its small bundles of nervous fibre.

Finally, we can see in the top part a model of mucosa from which the epithelium has partly been removed and where are numerous lymph follicles with the crypts in the middle.

Below is the longitudinal section of the proximal part of an humerus which shows the red marrow inside the spongy bone of the epiphysis and the yellow marrow in the medullary cavity of the shaft; moreover in this one the nutrient arteries can also be seen.

Finally we can observe a fragment of a flat bone of the cranial vault with the external table and diploe partially removed to show the internal table.