12S , i\ Till: NATURE AND rRJNCITLKS OK 



Phili]), and others, next claim our attention. These, 

 even more than those of Hunter, have served as the 

 chief support of all the modern views on the patho- 

 logy of inflammation. That they have supplied a 

 number of very interesting and important facts, by 

 which we have been enabled to understand the order 

 of the phenomena which occur in a part inflamed 

 by the application of a local irritant, no one can 

 deny. Where, formerly, all was vain conjecture, 

 we have now, through them, obtained a minute and 

 \\cll authenticated history of the successive changes 

 which occur in a part thus affected. For it may be 

 assumed that in conjunctivitis following the lodgment 

 of a foreign body on the eye, or in any other case of 

 inflammation consequent on the application of a 

 local irritant, the course of events is, in the human 

 body, analogous to that witnessed under the micro- 

 scope in the web of a frog's foot, or in the mesentery 

 of the mouse or rabbit. But I cannot perceive how 

 this information is to suggest the immediate cause, or 

 explain the nature of idiopathic inflammation. Nor 

 am I satisfied that the most minute observation of 

 its effects will, in this or any other case, lead to the 

 detection, or elucidate the operation, of the immediate 

 cause of a disease. And, in the present instance, 

 it must be confessed that, so far from having settled 

 the discussion as to the essential nature of inflamma- 

 tion, these microscopical observations, by introducing 

 into the consideration of a subject already sufficient I \ 

 complicated, innumerable obscure questions con- 

 nected with the physiology and pathology of the 

 blood, have added much to the difficulty of reducing 



