This system, remarkable among all the others by the hardness and
resistance that characterize it, has from this double attribute a
fitness to serve as a common base for all, upon which they rest, and
around which they are suspended and fixed. The whole of the pieces that
form it, are connected together for this use, by means of flexible and
resisting bands, which with these pieces make a whole that is called
a skeleton. The osseous whole, placed in the midst of many organs
that it sustains, everywhere continuous in its different parts, has
not however, like the primitive systems, continuity of peculiar life
from one of its extremities to the other. The bands which connect
these different pieces, very different from them in their nature and
their properties, produce in them an insulation of vitality, which the
different parts of the above systems do not exhibit, because in their
continuity their nature is everywhere the same.