The moving body
By the late 18th century,virtually all of the body's muscles had been identified and named.They are invariably in mirror-image pairs,emphasizing the symmetrical nature of the skeleton,as opposed to the inner organs such as the intestines.The biggest muscle is the gluteus maximus (p. 21)in the buttock.The smallest muscle is the stapedius,attached to the smallest bone,the stapes or stirrup (p. 55), inside the ear.Like a short piece of cotton thread,it pulls on the stapes to dampen the vibrations from too-loud sounds,preventing them from causing damage to the delicate inner ear.Once general music anatomy was complete,the microscopist and physiologists then discoverred exactly how muscles work.Jan Swammerdam (1637-1680)showed that muscles alter in shpe,not in size,during contraction.Luigi Galvani(1737-1798)(p.58)noted the link between muscles and electricity.Subsequnent research showed that muscles contract on stimulation by the tiny electrical impulses of nerve signals