The cartilages are perhaps of all the organs, those in which the
extensibility and contractility of texture are the least developed. We
see them rarely distended and elongated; they break first. Diseases
do not exhibit in the larynx those dilations so common in the other
cavities, even the osseous ones. When divided, the edges, far from
separating as in the skin, in a muscle, &c. approximate each other, as
we have seen, by the effect of elasticity; we might say that this last
property was accumulated in the cartilages at the expense of those of
texture.