CHANGES IN PANCREAS, PHOSPHORUS POISONING 249 



hematoxylin and counterstained with safranin and light green 

 showed the mitochondria and the zymogen granules blue-black, 

 the nuclei bright red and the i)lebs light red against a green 

 background. 



My observations seem to bear upon this problem in two ways. 

 In the first place I have found that the blebs in the normal 

 pancreas, with the method of technique employed, always stain 

 differently from the zymogen granules. In the second place 

 the changes which I have observed in phosphorus poisoning 

 seem to be still more suggestive. The fact that the blebs are 

 the very first structures to disappear with a very mild degree of 

 phosphorus poisoning (fig. 2) and that zymogen granules are 

 heaped up in enormous numbers in some cells of animals more 

 severely affected (fig. 7) would seem to indicate that the production 

 of zymogen granules does not necessarily cease with the disap- 

 pearance of the blebs, which is rather at variance with the hy- 

 pothesis that the mitochondria participate, through their bleb 

 like swellings, in the formation of zymogen granules. 



The agglutination observed during the course of phosphorus 

 poisoning is a new reaction on the part of mitochondria. It is 

 interesting to compare this clumping of mitochondria (which 

 are thought to be lipoidal in nature) with that of bacilli and red 

 blood cells. Jobling and Peterson ('14, p. 453) make the state- 

 ment that "with or without a morphologically distinct limiting 

 membrane we can reasonably assume that the external surface 

 of the bacterial cell is potentially lipoidal" and the lipoid nature 

 of red blood cells is well recognized. In each of these three cases 

 the fact that this phenomenon of agglutination is a reaction to 

 pathological conditions should not be lost sight of. Moreover 

 agglutination is a phenomenon which always occurs in a fluid 

 medium which fact is not without significance from the point of 

 view of cell structure because it indicates the fluid nature of 

 the protoplasm of the pancreas cell, and militates against the 

 doctrine of a cytoplasmic reticulum. 



It has long been known that there is a deposition, or perhaps 

 more correctly speaking a formation, of fatty lipoid droplets 

 in the cells of the pancreas as the result of phosphorus poisoning, 



