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entire substance was made up of nothing else but tangled filaments of 

 a confervoid type. However, before describing the microscopic cha- 

 racters of this singular substance, it will be necessary to give some 

 idea of the appearance of the mass, as examined without the aid of 

 the microscope. I have already compared the substances to shreds 

 of lymph or false membrane ; such shreds or flakes of soft yellow mat- 

 ter, assuming a membranous form, are familiar to every one accus- 

 tomed to pathological researches. It is well known that they are of- 

 ten the result of inflammation attacking membranous surfaces, and 

 that they are most frequently met with on the serous membranes, as 

 the pleura, pericardium and peritoneum, but that they are also occa- 

 sionally, though more rarely, produced from mucous surfaces, as those 

 which line the air-passages and alimentary canal. Of the same na- 

 ture as these have been also generally considered those fibrinous flakes 

 which are occasionally passed from the intestines in chronic affec- 

 tions of the mucous membrane of those parts, and which sometimes 

 assume the form of tubular casts, evidently moulded upon the surface 

 of the gut ; and lastly, I may allude to a more common affection of 

 another mucous surface, the lining membrane of the uterus, on which 

 membranous substances are occasionally formed and discharged, con- 

 stituting a complete cast of the organ, and familiar to every practi- 

 tioner as occurring occasionally in cases of dysmenorrhea. 



I allude to these examples (familiar enough to medical men) for the 

 purpose of showing to those who have not directed their attention to 

 such subjects, that membranous or fibrinous substances are occasion- 

 ally discharged from the various mucous surfaces of the body, w T hich 

 are generally considered to be the product of inflammation, either 

 acute or chronic, and are closely allied in composition and ordinary 

 characters to the fibrinous part of the blood, from which fluid they are 

 apparently separated by the inflammatory process. With such know- 

 ledge therefore we should, I think, be but little prepared to find that 

 flakes or shreds of a membranous substance, having so much of the 

 ordinary appearance of the substances which I have just described, 

 that several medical friends to whom I have shown them, have at 

 once supposed them to be the ordinary flakes of false membrane dis- 

 charged from the bowels, should, when microscopically examined, 

 present all the characters of those confervoid masses which are to be 

 found in almost every water, but the appearance of which to the na- 

 ked eye is so totally dissimilar to that of the substances under consi- 

 deration, that no one could for a moment suppose, without the aid of 



