=7.= When you want to make a snow man, you take one great roll of snow to
make the body or trunk. This you rest on two thinner rolls which serve
as legs. Near the top of the trunk you stick in another thin roll on
either side--these you call the two arms: and lastly, on quite the top
of the trunk you place a round ball for a head. Head, trunk, and limbs,
_i.e._ legs and arms--these together make up a complete body.
In your snow man these are all alike, all balls of snow differing only
in size and form; but in your own body, head, trunk, and limbs are quite
unlike, as you might easily tell on taking them to pieces. Now you
cannot very well take your own body to pieces, but you easily can that
of a dead rabbit. Suppose you take one of the limbs, say a leg, to begin
with.
First of all there is the =skin= with the hair on the outside. If you
carefully cut this through with a knife or pair of scissors and strip it
off, you will find it smooth and shiny inside. Underneath the skin you
see what you call =flesh=, rather paler, not so red as the flesh of beef
or mutton, but still quite like it. Covering the flesh there may be a
little =fat=. In a sheep’s leg as you see it at the butcher’s there is a
good deal of fat, in the rabbit’s there is very little.
This reddish flesh you must henceforward learn to speak of as =muscle=. If
you pull it about a little, you will find that you can separate it
easily into parcels or slips running lengthways down the leg, each slip
being fastened tight at either end, but loose between. Each slip is what
is called =a muscle=. You will notice that many of these muscles are
joined, sometimes at one end only, sometimes at both, to white or bluish
white glistening cords or bands; made evidently of different material
from the muscle itself. They are not soft and fleshy like the muscle,
but firm and stiff. These are =tendons=. Sometimes they are broad and
short, sometimes thin and long.
As you are separating these muscles from each other you will see
(running down the leg between them) little white soft threads, very
often branching out and getting too small to be seen. These are =nerves=.
Between the muscles too are other little cords, red, or reddish black,
and if you prick them, a drop or several drops of blood will ooze out.
These are =veins=, and are not really cords or threads, but hollow tubes,
filled with blood. Lying alongside the veins are similar small tubes,
containing very little blood, or none at all. These are =arteries=. The
=veins= and =arteries= together are called =blood-vessels=, and it will be
easy for you to make out that the larger ones you see are really hollow
tubes. Lastly, if you separate the muscles still more, you will come
upon the hard =bone= in the middle of the leg, and if you look closely you
will find that many of the muscles are fastened to this bone.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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