IV. On the structure and use of the Malpighian bodies of the kidney, with observations on the circulation through that gland

Abstract

These remarkable bodies have been an object of much interest since their discovery by the great anatomist whose name they bear. Malpighi found they could be injected with great facility from the arteries, and he imagined them to be glands, in which the urine is elaborated from the blood. He seems also to have been of opinion that in them the uriniferous tubes take their rise. Ruysch examined them with great care, and preserved specimens in his museum in which he believed that he had shown, by injection, that in them the arteries are continuous with the tubes. This was the principal ground for the famous, but now exploded theory, of the existence of exhalant arteries with open mouths, which in the secreting glands opened directly into the excretory canals. It is probable that this accurate observer mistook the efferent vessel of the Malpighian body for a uriniferous tube, for the efferent vessels of those Malpighian bodies that lie near the medullary part of the kidney, take the same course as the tubes, and are often large enough to be readily mistaken for them. The statement, however, of Ruysch and others, that the tubes may be injected from the arteries, is true, though in a different sense from that in which they understood it.