PROGRESS OF MICROSCOPICAL SCIENCE. 
205 
glands themselves. Professor Turner has not satisfied himself that 
the cells in the crypts are ciliated, but they are more or less columnar, 
swollen, and sometimes binucleated. In the cetacean, Orca gladiator, 
which Professor Turner has studied specially, the ridges are tolerably 
regularly arranged in parallel rows. But the crypts exist both on the 
ridges and on the furrows, and Professor Turner at first thought the 
glands opened into some of the crypts, and it seemed as if the crypts were 
only the enlarged mouths of the glands, but he soon found that, as the 
crypts are pretty uniformly distributed, the glands must open into some 
of them, and that here again the crypts cannot be regarded as the 
mouths of the glands. 
Professor Turner observed that some of these points had been 
clearly seen by Eschricht in the porpoise many years ago, the crypts 
being named by him cellulae, and the bare comparatively non- vascular 
spots areolae. 
The cotyledonary placenta of the ruminants was then considered. 
It was shown that here also the crypts, with the intercryptal sub- 
stance, enlarged immensely at certain spots, forming the cotyledons, 
whilst the glands were pushed aside, as it were, and the foetal villi did 
not penetrate into their interior. 
Effect of Curare on the Emigration White of Blood-globules. — An 
anonymous writer says that if the blood of a frog poisoned by curare 
be examined on the second or third day of immobility, it is found to 
contain no leucocytes ; these, however, reappear as the power of 
voluntary movement is restored, and gradually resume their customary 
proportion to the red corpuscles. This observation was made by 
Drozdoff, who attributes the phenomenon to a specific poisonous 
action of the drug on the colourless corpuscles; he found that the 
addition of a minute proportion of curare to a drop of blood, after its 
removal from the body, speedily arrested the amoeboid movements of 
the leucocytes, and rendered their protoplasm granular. Tarchanoff, 
working under Kanvier’s direction,* repeated Drozdoff’ s experiments, 
the results of which he partially confirms, while explaining them in a 
very different way. The gradual disappearance of leucocytes from 
the blood of the curarized frog is an undoubted fact ; but the pheno- 
menon cannot be ascribed to any specific action of curare upon 
protoplasm. The addition of curare to drops of blood in the moist 
chamber yielded results which were by no means constant ; some 
samples of the drug speedily destroying the colourless corpuscles, 
while others appeared in no way to influence their vitality. What 
then is the cause of their disappearance (which is never really abso- 
lute) from the circulating fluid ? They migrate into the perivascular 
spaces, and accumulate in the lymphatic sacs and serous cavities. 
This emigration is associated with a considerable transudation of the 
fluid constituents of the plasma, so that, pari passu with its increasing 
poverty in leucocytes, the blood is observed to contain an abnormally 
large proportion of red disks. Both processes may be accounted 
for by the paralyzing effect of the drug upon the vasomotor nerves ; 
* ‘Archives de Physiologie,’ Janvier-Fe'vrier, 1875. 
