THE MICROSCOPE. 105 



undoubted improvement in their general condition which must be 

 solely ascribed to the absorption of nutritive elements from the 

 desiccated blood. The use of nutritive inhalations is, a» far as I 

 know, a novel idea and I was prompted to try it by the fact, which I 

 had observed, that butchers as a rule are strong, healthy men, but 

 are rather poor eaters, and especially do they eat little meat. Thus 

 it occurred to me that they might possibly obtain a sufficient amount 

 of nitrogenized food by absorbing through the mucous membrane 

 of the lungs and the respiratory tract, the exhalation from the fresh 

 meat they handle. 



After having thus proved the efficacy of the preparation in three 

 cases at least, I made careful microscopical examinations of the 

 blood, with a view to determine to my own satisfaction whether any 

 fibrin vt^as contained in it; whether the morphological elements of the 

 blood had been destroyed in the process of drying ; whether the 

 albumen had been coagulated or was in a soluble sha.pe ; and finally 

 whether the desiccated blood contained any impurities. 



I first made a solution of the preparation in plain water (six 

 drachms to five ounces) and from this prepared a number of slides. 

 A careful search, h :)\vi7er, for fi'jrin binih aui blojd corpuscles 

 was altogether fruitless, and the field of the microscope was filled 

 with granular masses floating in a slightly colored fluid, the constit- 

 uents of which could even under tlic higher powers (i-io immer- 

 sion) not be resolved into any shap2. Ijesides these granular masses 

 I noticed a number of globules of various sizes which somewhat 

 resembled small drops of oil, for which I at first mistook them, with- 

 out being able to account for their presence, except that they might 

 have been introduced during the process of drying the fresh blood. 

 This supposition was, however, not tenable, because even after the 

 solution, from which the specimens had been prepared, had remained 

 quiet for twelve hours, no oil could be detected floating on its sur- 

 face. 



I next made a solution of the dried blood acc\)rding to the 

 formula devised by Dr. J. C. Richardson, of Philadelphia, which is 

 to dissolve dried blood in a solution of common table salt in distilled 

 water of the strength of fifty-six grains to the pint. I^rom this solu- 

 tion also a number of slides were prepared, and on examination I 

 experienced no difficulty in finding a large number of blood corpus- 

 cles in the field of the microscope. They were of the average size 



