The glandular forms are not fixed and invariable; they exhibit a thousand different modifications in their size, direction and proportions; they have never the precise and exact conformation of the organs of animal life. This fact can be disputed by no one who has examined a number of dead bodies. The following are the means by which I have made this most evident to myself. We know that the organs vary much in size, in different individuals; now, in these varieties the proportions are always accurately kept in animal life, whilst it is rare that they are so in organic life. Let us take an organ for example in each of the two lives. I have always seen that in a small brain the corpus callosum, the thalami nervorum opticorum, the corpora striata, &c. are in proportion to the whole size of the organ. On the contrary, nothing is more common than to see a large lobe of Spigelius with a small liver, and vice versa a large liver with a small lobe. There is no anatomist who has not had frequent occasion to make this remarkable observation. A kidney is larger sometimes in its superior part, sometimes in its inferior, &c. It is in the whole of the organ that these varieties of size take place in animal life; it is oftentimes in insulated parts only in organic life. The reason of this appears to me to be that the harmony of action is necessary, as I have demonstrated, for the animal functions; so that if one side of the brain is more developed than the other, if one eye, one ear, one pituitary membrane, &c. are more developed than their corresponding organs, the perception, the sight, the hearing, the smell, &c. would be inevitably deranged; whilst the secretion of bile, of urine, &c. takes place equally well, though one part of these glands may be larger or smaller than the other parts. There is a remark to be made respecting the glands with regard to these varieties of form, it is, that those which are covered by a membrane, as the liver, the kidneys, even the pancreas, are less exposed to them than those which are buried in cellular texture without having around them a membranous covering, as the salivary, the lachrymal, the mucous glands, &c. I have often examined these last in the mouth and in the course of the trachea; I never found them alike in two subjects. We know that the parotid sometimes extends upon the masseter, and sometimes does not, that it descends more or less into the neck, that it is of a greater or less size there, &c. When one gland of a pair is wanting or becomes diseased, sometimes the other increases considerably in size, as I have seen in the kidneys. This takes place also in the treatment by compression of salivary fistulas, a treatment which does not however always succeed. In other cases, the sound gland increases its action and secretes more fluid, without increasing in size.