certain Urinary Deposits during Transportation. 223 



hundred miles, occupying more than a week of the hot weather with 

 which we were visited during the past summer, had given time 

 enough for complete decomposition to occur, and, although one of 

 the specimens was prepared with a small portion of carbolic acid 

 solution, entire putrefaction had taken place in both before their 

 arrival. The vial which had been merely sealed up gave forth when 

 uncorked a strongly ammoniacal odour, and its deposit was composed 

 only of amorphous granular matter. The other specimen, to which 

 carbolic acid had been added, contained an abundant white coagulum, 

 without any tube-casts, epithelial cells, or leucocytes. Numerous 

 mycelial threads of fungous vegetation presented themselves, and 

 were probably capable of developing in the solution to which carbolic 

 acid had been added, because that acid was deprived of its parasinoidal 

 properties when it combined with the albumen of the urine. 



On mentally reviewing the preservative agents at our disposal, 

 and rejecting, of course, alcoholic and arsenical fluids, on account of 

 their power of coagulating albuminous substances, it occurred to me 

 that solution of acetate of potash, whose admirable properties as a 

 preservative menstruum for microscopic objects formed the subject 

 of one of my communications to this Section last year, would best 

 serve our purpose ; and I therefore wrote to my correspondent, in- 

 forming him of the ill-success of his first venture, and requesting 

 him to prepare another specimen by filling a similar small vial with 

 dry acetate of potash, and then pouring in a fluid drachm of the 

 sediment let fall from his morning urine after standing twelve hours 

 in a cool place. 



On the 12th of September I again received two samples, one of 

 which had been mixed with the washings of a bottle that had 

 formerly contained acetate of potash, and which comprised the 

 Doctor's entire stock of the salt ; the other prepared with a small 

 portion — about twenty drops — of alcohol. Both of these were 

 worthless for microscopic examination ; and I therefore procured a 

 two-drachm vial of solid acetate of potash and forwarded it to my 

 patient by return mail, requesting him as before to add to its 

 contents a fluid drachm of his urinary deposit. 



This last experiment in the preservation of a urinary sediment 

 for transportation, the fifth of the series it completed, was entirely 

 successful, the preparation reaching me about the 1st of October, 

 not only in such a condition as to show well-defined hyaline, granular, 

 and fatty epithelial casts of the uriniferous tubules in great abundance, 

 but likewise embalming, so to speak, those pathognomonic signs of 

 Bright 's disease so perfectly that a drop of the fluid, which I have 

 placed beneath one of the academy's microscopes this evening, 

 exhibits numerous tube-casts with admirable distinctness, even 

 although more than six weeks have now elapsed since this identical 

 sample which I here hold in my hand was prepared for examination, 

 upwards of twelve hundred miles away. 



