You could have saved yourself the use of the established formula: "When you shall have made your microscopic examination, I will tell you what it is." These little tricks amount to nothing: my microscope knows better than you do what you have sent me.

You know the form and color of things: _it_ sees their inmost nature, the laws of their being, the conditions of their life and death.
"Your fragment of desiccated matter, half as broad as my nail and nearly as thick, after remaining for twenty-four hours under a bell-glass in an atmosphere saturated with water at the temperature of the human body, became supple--so much so as to be a little elastic.

I could consequently dissect it, study it like a piece of fresh flesh, and put under the microscope each one of its parts that appeared different, in consistency or color, from the rest.
"I at once found, in the middle, a slight portion harder and more elastic than the rest, which presented the texture and cellular structure of cartilage.

This was neither the cartilage of the nose, nor the cartilage of an articulation, but certainly the fibro-cartilage of the ear.

You sent me, then, the end of an ear, and it is not the lower end--the lobe which women pierce to put their gold ornaments in, but the upper end, into which the cartilage extends.
"On the inner-side, I took off a fine skin, in which the microscope showed me an epidermis, delicate, perfectly intact; a derma no less intact, with little papillae and, moreover, covered with a lot of fine human hairs.