The Role of the Lymphatic System for Water Balance and Acid-Base Regulation in the Amphibia

Abstract

In 1833 the Royal Society of London published an article by Johannes Muller which decribed the existence of “four distinct hearts, having regular pulsations, connected with the lymphatic system, in certain amphibious animals.” In this initial publication on the amphibian lymphatic system, Muller described many of the features which characterize this unique network. He found, for example, that frogs have lymph spaces beneath the skin, that there are large accumulations of lymph in these cavities and that the irregular beating of lymph hearts lacks any synchrony with the blood heart. It is perhaps a tribute to the ubiquitous nature and versatility of “the frog” that, before the turn of the 20th century, a wide variety of prominent anatomists, physiologists, embryologists and histologists, such as Panizza (1834), Schiff (1850), Ranvier (1880), von Leydig (1876), Ecker (1889) and Priestley (1878a, b), had published scientific studies elucidating diverse aspects of the amphibian lymphatic system. Of special note is the fact that the first two articles in the first issue of the Journal of Physiology (London) are by John Priestley and detail the anatomy and physiology of amphibian lymph hearts (Priestley 1878a, b).