Part 1

Produced by deaurider, Harry Lamé and the Online Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This file was produced from images generously made available by The Internet Archive)

Transcriber’s Notes

Text printed in italics in the source document has been transcribed between underscores, text printed in bold face =between equal signs=. Small capitals have been transcribed as ALL CAPITALS.

More Transcriber’s Notes may be found at the end of this text.

ANATOMY OF THE CAT

JACOB REIGHARD Professor of Zoology in the University of Michigan

AND

H. S. JENNINGS Instructor in Zoology in the University of Michigan

WITH ONE HUNDRED AND SEVENTY-THREE ORIGINAL FIGURES DRAWN BY LOUISE BURRIDGE JENNINGS

NEW YORK HENRY HOLT AND COMPANY 1901

ROBERT DRUMMOND, PRINTER, NEW YORK.

PREFACE.

Although the cat has long been in common use for the practical study of mammalian anatomy, a clear, correct, not too voluminous account of its structure, such as should be in the hands of students in the laboratory, has remained a desideratum. A number of works have been published on the cat, some of them of much value, yet there is none which fulfils exactly the conditions mentioned. The books which have appeared on this subject are the following:

1. Strauss-Durckheim, H. Anatomie descriptive et comparative du Chat. 2 vols. Paris, 1845.

2. Mivart, St. George. The Cat: an Introduction to the Study of Back-boned Animals, especially Mammals. New York, 1881.

3. Wilder, Burt G., and Gage, Simon H. Anatomical Technology as applied to the Domestic Cat. New York, 1882.

4. Gorham, F. P., and Tower, R. W. A Laboratory Guide for the Dissection of the Cat. New York, 1895.

5. Jayne, H. Mammalian Anatomy. Vol. I. Philadelphia, 1898.

The first of these works treats only of the muscles and bones, and is not available for American students. Its excellent plates (or Williams’s outline reproductions of the same) should be in every laboratory.

The second book named is written in such general terms that its descriptions are not readily applicable to the actual structures found in the dissection of the cat, and experience has shown that it is not fitted for a laboratory handbook. It contains, in addition to a general account of the anatomy of the cat, also a discussion of its embryology, psychology, palæontology, and classification.

The book by Wilder and Gage professedly uses the cat as a means of illustrating technical methods and a special system of nomenclature. While of much value in many ways, it does not undertake to give a complete account of the anatomy of the animal.

The fourth work is a brief laboratory guide.

The elaborate treatise by Jayne, now in course of publication, is a monumental work, which will be invaluable for reference, but is too voluminous to place in the hands of students. At present only the volume on the bones has been published.

As appears from the above brief characterization, none of these books gives a complete description of the anatomy of the cat in moderate volume and without extraneous matter. This is what the present work aims to do.

In the year 1891-92, Professor Reighard prepared a partial account of the anatomy of the cat, which has since been in use, in typewritten form, in University of Michigan classes. It has been used also at the Universities of Illinois, Nebraska, and West Virginia, and in Dartmouth College, and has proven so useful for college work in Mammalian Anatomy that it was decided to complete it and prepare it for publication. This has been done by Dr. Jennings.

The figures, which are throughout original, are direct reproductions of ink drawings, made under the direction of Dr. Jennings by Mrs. Jennings.

The book is limited to a description of the normal anatomy of the cat. The direct linear action of each muscle taken alone has been given in the description of muscles; other matters belonging to the realm of physiology, as well as all histological matter, have been excluded. It was felt that the monumental work of Jayne on the anatomy of the cat, now in course of publication, forms the best repository for a description of variations and abnormalities, so that these have been mentioned in the present volume only when they are so frequent as to be of much practical importance.

Except where the contrary is stated, the descriptions are based throughout on our own dissections and observations and are in no sense a compilation. For this reason we have not thought it necessary to collect the scattered references to the anatomy of the cat that may occur in the literature. A collection of such references may be found in Wilder and Gage’s Anatomical Technology. In addition to the works already referred to, we have of course made use of the standard works on human and veterinary anatomy. Among these should be mentioned as especially useful the Anatomie des Hundes by Ellenberger and Baum. Other publications which have been of service in the preparation of the work are Windle and Parson’s paper On the Myology of the Terrestrial Carnivora, in the Proceedings of the Zoological Society of London for 1897 and 1898, T. B. Stowell’s papers on the nervous system of the cat in the Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society (1881, 1886, 1888) and in the Journal of Comparative Neurology (vol. I.), and F. Clasen’s Die Muskeln und Nerven des proximalen Abschnitts der vorderen Extremität der Katze, in Nova Acta der Ksl. Leop.-Carol. Deutschen Akademie der Naturforscher, Bd. 64.