The author of this volume, Rudolf Armin Fick (born February 24, 1866, in Zurich; died May 23, 1939, in Berlin), was an anatomist, pathologist, and university lecturer. As the successor to Heinrich Wilhelm Waldeyer, he worked at the Friedrich-Wilhelms-University in Berlin until his retirement in 1934. Among his students was the later Nobel Prize winner Werner Forssmann, who described him in his memoirs as a "modern anatomist" who, together with others, "revived the field from the stagnation it had fallen into." Since 1915, he was a member of the Leopoldina and, since 1918, a full member of the Prussian Academy of Sciences. Rudolf Fick's main areas of research were muscle and joint mechanics as well as comparative anatomy with great apes. The volume is illustrated with 162 black-and-white images. It is a reprint of the original edition.