386 Airrurii william mever 



coniinunicr.tes with the sinus and which contains blood as a 

 lyni])liatic while Sabin regards it as a vein. Rabl says that 

 the node described by him belongs in the class of hemal lym- 

 phatic nodes of the English; or 'lymphoider Bluknoten' of Baum 

 but that he .prefers to call it a 'Blutlymphknoten' in the nar- 

 rower sense ! 



\Mien I happened upon the subcutaneous hemaj nodes of 

 cattle (Meyer '08) and found by means of injections that these 

 were invariably hemal and never lymphatic in character and 

 only very rarely lay in such close association with lymphatic 

 nodes as the hemal nodes in other parts of the body often do, 

 it seemed that a long search for some nodes even if not for an 

 individual node, the development of which could easily be deter- 

 mined was at last ended. It was, to be sure, an easy matter 

 to trace these subcutaneous nodes back to a foetal length of 

 22 cm. as then reported, but unfortunately all of these foetal 

 nodes the smallest of w^hich w^ere scarcely discernible with a 

 hand lens were quite completely formed and since none of the 

 individual subcutaneous nodes are constant as to exact posi- 

 tion, the development of an individual specimen could not be 

 traced by excision of the subcutaneous tissues in any small 

 area alone. Hence, recourse had to be taken to excision of 

 large portions of the superficial tissues in the regions in which 

 the nodes are usually found in the adult. Although this was 

 done in several instances at that time, nodes in the earliest 

 stages of development were unfortunately not obtained. Be- 

 cause of the rather large amount of technical work involved 

 in a rather random search and also for other reasons, the prose- 

 cution of this work was interrupted. The search for the earliest 

 stages was continued, however, as material became available 

 annually and extremely early stages in the development of 

 these hemal nodes have finally been found. 



As was to be surmised from our knowledge of the occurrence 

 of the mature nodes it does not necessarily follow^ that the earliest 

 developmental stages can be obtained easily by merely proceed- 

 ing to younger and younger foetuses. This might, to be sure, 

 have been the case, but since hemal nodes vary so much in the 



