i\)0 



AVilliam Norris, of this city, but for some years past residing 

 in Germany, in an article now in press, detailing observa- 

 tions made, chiefly on the corneee of frogs, in conjunction 

 with Prof. Strieker, of Vienna, Avhile maintaining that some 

 of the corpuscles of pus originate in the proper cells of the 

 tissue, admits as indubitable that many are in reality white 

 blood-globules which have made their way through the walls 

 of the vessels, as Cohnheim describes. 



It has been urged, however, by some assailants of this doc- 

 trine, that even admitting, for the sake of the argument, 

 Cohnheim's views on inflammation to be correct as regards 

 the inferior animals, upon which his experiments were tried, 

 there is no proof that the same ignoble process of suppuration 

 affects man, a creature of such far higher attributes ; but on 

 this point I trust that my own experiments, published in the 

 ' Pennsylvania Hospital Reports' for 1869, will be found con- 

 clusive. By diluting a drop of my OAvn blood upon a slide, 

 with pure water introduced at the margin of the thin glass 

 cover, and thus reducing the liquor sanguinis to the specific 

 gravity of the saliva, I found it quite possible to watch every 

 step of the change, in which by mere distension the white 

 blood-cell is converted into the salivary corpuscle, with its 

 one, two, or three nuclei, its actively revolving molecules con- 

 fined by a cell-wall of exceeding tenuity, capable of present- 

 ing all the phenomena of deep-staining of the nuclei with 

 the entire cessation of movement on the addition of aniline 

 dye. In like manner, Avhen the liquor muci and liquor puris 

 are similarly diluted their corpuscles are also seen for the 

 most part to be converted into salivary globules, and I infer, 

 therefore, that we may regard the strong presumption afforded 

 by Cohnheim's experiments upon the rabbit as established into 

 a fact, and conclude that most (at any rate) of the corpuscles 

 of human pus are simply white blood-cells which have Avan- 

 dered out through the vascular walls. — Joseph G. Richard- 

 son, M.D., Philadelphia. — American Journal of Medical 

 Sciences, January, 1870. 



