The New Views as to the Morphology of the Thymus Gland and Their Bearing on the Problem of the Function of the Thymus

It has almost become an established expression in discussing the thymus gland, to call it an “enigmatic organ.” This may still have been justified a couple of decades ago, when our knowledge of this organ was restricted to certain not very clear data, but nowadays the expression is scarcely more justified for this than for a large number of other organs in the body. It can even with justice be said that in certain not unessential respects our knowledge of the thymus is more thorough than that of the majority of the organs closely related to it functionally. If, nevertheless, the expression in question or the view that it represents reappears not infrequently even in publications of recent date, this is certainly connected with the fact that the knowledge of the results of more recent investigations is still but slightly spread; one often comes across, at least in clinical literature, expositions that start out from older and notoriously incorrect views.