Page:The Harveian oration, 1873.djvu/39

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diagrams before you. It is not altogether rare to see this band raise itself from the position of fusion, like the ventricular wall, and assume the character of a cylindrical band for a lesser distance, but with no less distinctness as a column, than in the Ungulata. Such a case I had actually before me whilst writing this, and you have it now figured before you (Fig. 4)[1].

Every gradation, in fact, exists between the entire obsolescence of the moderator

  1. Since this oration was delivered I have received two communications relating to the presence of a moderator band in the human heart. One of these, from my former pupil, J. C. Galton, Esq. F.L.S., was accompanied by a sketch in which a moderator band was drawn as passing in a human heart from the insertion into the movable wall of the ventricle and the very constant musculus papillaris supplying what I would call the 'conad' and 'dextrad' cusps of the tricuspid, to an origin on the interventricular septum, sending a root up to the point of origin of one of the chordae tendineae of the third cusp, called 'septal' by Mr. Galton. See also Mr. Galton's Letter to British Medical Journal, July 26, 1873, p. 83. I have to thank Dr. Headlam Greenhow for a reference to another notice of the presence of a moderator band in a human heart. It will be found in an interesting paper of his in the Transactions of the Pathological Society, vol. xxi. 1870, p. 88.