THE COAGULATION OF THE BLOOD. 373 



white corpuscles. This was explained by saying that 

 the white corpuscles are exceedingly sensitive to change ; 

 while they are swimming happily round their circle from 

 arteries to veins and from veins back to arteries again they 

 are in their element, and so they do not break up, or only 

 so slowly that the vascular wall is able to cope with the 

 products of their death ; but when they get out of their 

 normal habitat, they break down, not in ones or twos, but 

 in battalions, and the innocent fibrinogen falls a victim, and 

 starts a new phase of existence as fibrin. This explanation 

 is, of course, no explanation ; it is hardly an apology for 

 one ; if we were able to say why the white corpuscles die 

 we should be very near to explaining the mystery of the 

 difference between life and death. 



About the time, now nearly twenty years ago, when 

 scepticism of this sort was simmering, some folks began to 

 inquire whether it really is the fact that the white corpuscles 

 break up when the blood dies ; and to the late Dr. Wool- 

 dridge belongs the credit of pointing out that this funda- 

 mental point in the ferment theory rests on very flimsy 

 evidence. Soon one of Schmidt's pupils, Rauschenbach by 

 name, had to admit that there were two classes of white 

 corpuscles, one class consisting of those which did, the 

 other of those that did not disintegrate. Prof. Havcraft, 

 too, was never able to see actual disintegration, though he 

 described certain differences of appearance between the 

 living and the dead leucocyte (white corpuscle). Observa- 

 tions made much more recently in my own laboratory have 

 led me to follow in the wake of these observers, and I feel 

 that the word disintegration must not be taken in the too 

 literal sense in which it was used by Schmidt ; it may be 

 that the dying corpuscle sheds out material, though it does 

 not break up into fragments. 



Wooldridge thus started a new era in the history of the 

 subject ; he, perhaps somewhat hastily, propounded a new 

 theory, part of which will perhaps stand. But whether it 

 does or not matters but little, for, by breaking new ground, 

 and inspiring healthy scepticism, he has succeeded by his 

 own work, and by that of his followers, in introducing new 



