c. The cone-shaped streaks of pigment in the vitreous body belong to the
underlying pigment cells, in fact are direct continuations of them, and
at their distal ends they are prolonged into fibrous processes lying in
canals of the vitreous body exactly like the visual fibres of Schewiakoff.
d. The vitreous body is not a homogeneous secretion, but is composed of
prisms of refracting substance, each with a denser central fibre.
Let us go over these four points in detail.
(a) As to the first, the question whether there is an alternation of
pigment and visual cells, I am not prepared as yet to make a positive
statement, since my not seeing both kinds as they are described has
little evidential value against the fact that Claus and Schewiakoff both
claim to have seen them. Perhaps proof could be obtained one way or the
other by maceration of fresh or of specially prepared material, which
none of us had. My evidence for not confirming alternation rests wholly
upon sections. Fig. 58 represents a radial section through part of the
larger eye of Charybdea, made from an osmic preparation which in this
case showed two advantages over the material fixed in corrosive-acetic
(usually by all odds the best), namely, that the vitreous body (_vb_) was
not shrunken away from the retinal cells, as almost invariably happens,
and that the retinal cells were contracted apart from one another in some
places in such a way as to be almost equal to a macerated preparation.
Now, in the figure it is seen that there is an apparent alternation of
two kinds of cells, more regular than I usually find, but the ones that
are undoubtedly the pigment cells of Schewiakoff are the ones that show
the fibrous processes like his visual cells, and the pigment streaks
in the vitreous body are seen to be integral parts of the cells, not
cone-shaped masses lying in the vitreous body, merely associated with
the pigment cells. If these _are_ the pigment cells of Schewiakoff,
the shorter cells in between must be his visual cells, yet they can by
no means be said to conform to a spindle-shaped type, nor are their
nuclei always at a lower level than (that is, internal to) those of
the pigment cells. If the long cells with the fibres are, on the other
hand, considered the visual cells of Schewiakoff, then again we find
nonconformity to a spindle-shaped type, and nuclei not always at a lower
level. The matter of alternation of nuclei at different levels seems
to me any way too slight a distinction upon which to base a difference
in function. It is a necessary mechanical consequence of the crowding
together of many cells on one surface. And in many cases in perfectly
radial sections through the retina I find the nuclei fewer in number and
arranged in very nearly a single level. The retina of the smaller eye
represented in Fig. 69 shows this. In sections further along in the same
series the nuclei are found at different levels, due without doubt to the
slanting cut.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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