Recherches Experimentales sur les Fonctions de la Vessie Natatoire [Experimental research on the functions of the fish swim bladder] by Moreau, Armand - 1876

Paris: G. Masson, 1876. First edition.

1865 MONOGRAPH ON THE PHYSIOLOGY OF THE FISH SWIM BLADDER BY STUDENT OF CLAUDE BERNARD, INSCRIBED TO EMINENT EMBRYOLOGIST.

16x24.5 cm offprint from Annales des Sciences Naturelles in blue paper wraps, inscribed top of cover, "a Monsieur Felix Henneguy, amical et sympathique souvenir de laboratoire, Armand Moreau". Title page, 85 pp, 2 fine engraved plates showing experimental physiologic apparatus. Soiling to covers, browning to page edges, light foxing, very good minus in custom archival card folder.

FRANCOIS-ARMAND MOREAU (1823-1881) was a student of the eminent CLAUDE BERNARD (1813 – 1878), master physiologist and proponent of the concept of the milieu interieur. Moreau is co-author of the definitive edition of L'oeuvre de Claude Bernard, published in 1881. Moreau served as laboratory assistant of ETIENNE-JULES MAREY (1830 – 1904) at the College de France. Marey was a physiologist and chronophotographer, making significant contributions to the development of physical instrumentation, cinematography and the science of laboratory photography. He was also a pioneer in establishing a variety of graphical techniques for the display and interpretation of quantitative data from physiological measurement, essential to Moreau's studies of the fish swim bladder, evolutionarily homologous to the lungs. Charles Darwin remarked upon this in On the Origin of Species (1859): "The illustration of the swim bladder in fishes is a good one, because it shows us clearly the highly important fact that an organ originally constructed for one purpose, namely, flotation, may be converted into one for a widely different purpose, namely, respiration. According to this view it may be inferred that all vertebrate animals with true lungs are descended by ordinary generation from an ancient and unknown prototype, which was furnished with a floating apparatus or swim bladder."

PROVENANCE: LOUIS-FELIX HENNEGUY (1850 – 1928) was a French zoologist and embryologist born in Paris. During his career he was a professor of comparative embryology at the Collège de France (1900–28), and a member of the Académie de Médecine, the Académie d'Agriculture and the Académie des sciences (1908–28). From 1894 he was director of the journal, Archives d'anatomie microscopique. With Hungarian neuroanatomist, Mihály Lenhossék (1863–1937), the "Henneguy–Lenhossek theory" is named, which states the claim that mitotic centrioles and ciliary basal kinetosomes are fundamentally the same structure.