The kidneys basically function in not only in excretion, but also in controlling and regulating the osmolarity of our blood plasma. Now, in this lecture, we're going to focus on the basic anatomy and structure of the kidney. So let's begin by taking a cross section of any one of our kidneys. We basically obtained the following diagram. So we sliced our kidney and this is what it looks like. So notice that we have many of these individual sections and structures found inside our kidney and this is what we're going to focus on in this lecture.