HEMAL NODES IN BOVINES AND GOATS 371 



forms were pieseiit in any animal. Trabeculae were prac- 

 tically absent in all small nodes and the whole architecture 

 was an exceedingly dehcate one. Only a few foUicles and small 

 quantities of intracellular pigment were present. Not a single 

 giant cell was found and erythrophages were seen in large num- 

 bers in one specimen only. They were so large that they gave 

 the section a striking appearance on low power magnification 

 and many of them were so crowded with erythrocytes that they 

 looked like a sac of blood. Drummond, '00 said the same thing 

 about certain hyaUne cells derived from lymphocytes which he 

 said became amoeboid and phagocytic. These large hyaline cells 

 Drummond found absent in foetal dogs, sheep and rats, and 

 he thought that the formation of hyaline cells may suddenly 

 begin and the destruction of erythrocytes then take place be- 

 cause he found thousands of phagocytes in sections containing 

 unchanged erythrocytes. 



In some sections about fifty quite well-preserved erythro- 

 cytes could be counted without change of focus in surface views 

 of individual erythrophages in the nodes from these goats. 

 Hence, each phagocyte must literally have contained hundreds 

 of erythrocytes in greater or lesser states of degeneration. That 

 these phagocytic cells were not polymorphonuclear leucocytes 

 is beyond question. The nuclei were always vesicular with 

 definite but few^ chromatic granules and but seldom were mark- 

 edly irregular in outUne. As in case of the few hemal nodes 

 of the sheep, in which such a marked ingestion of erythrocytes 

 was noticed, these phagocytic cells were apparently large leu- 

 cocytes with a large vesicular nucleus, which are so common 

 in hemal nodes although they may have been endothelial in 

 origin. In most of these nodes dozens of eosinophiles were also 

 scattered throughout the sections; however, the origin of the 

 eosinophile granules through the ingestion and transformation 

 of fragments of erythrocytes as claimed by Weidenreich does 

 not seem highly probable to me. As a whole, then, the hemal 

 nodes of goats were very small, the folHcles were few, trabeculae 

 were practically absent, the amount of connective tissue within 



