ELEMENTARY GRANULES. 41 



A. SIMPLE ELEMENTARY PARTS. 



1. ELEMENTARY GRANULES, ELEMENTARY VESICLES, NUCLEI. 



§ G. In almost all animal fluids, ■whether contained in canals, or enclosed 

 in cells, as well as in many more solid tissues, there are found and often 

 in immense quantities, roundish corpuscles of very small, hardly mea- 

 urable dimensions. Henle has called them "elementary granules," 

 and has expressed the opinion that they are vesicular. This, however, 

 is not always true, since it is demonstrable that many of these corpus- 

 cles possess no investment. Such is the case with the fatty particles 

 which occur in many cells and glandular secretions, with the granules of 

 the black pigment of the eye and of other colored cells, the granular 

 precipitates of biliary coloring matter, of different salts in the kidneys, 

 and in the urine ; lastly, the protein granules (albuminous granules) 

 which are found free in certain portions of the gray substance of the 

 central nervous system and of the retina. Among the pathological but 

 very common formations, we must enumerate here amorphous deposits, 

 the colloid granules in the thyroid and elsewhere, and the corpuscula 

 amijlacca of the central nervous system, although these sometimes attain 

 a very considerable size. All these granules want the properties ob- 

 served in the higher elementary parts, such as endogenous growth, mul- 

 tiplication, assimilation, and excretion, and so far incline towards the 

 purely inorganic forms — crystals ; which are also found, though less 

 commonly, in the organism, as for example in the spleen, in the lungs 

 (black columns), in the ear, in the cells of the preputial glands of the 

 rat, in the blood-corpuscles of the dog and of fishes, in the fat-cells of 

 man, and in the cells of the chorion of the embryo of sheep. 



Elementary vesicles also occur very frequently, and are for the most 

 part allied, physiologically, with the elementary granules, since, once 

 formed they do not increase, and neither multiply by division nor by 

 endogenous development. The milk-globules may with tolerable cer- 

 tainty be arranged among these ; at first included within the cells of 

 the nascent milk, they are subsequently found free, in enormous numbers, 

 in the perfect secretion, and, as Henle first stated, consist of the fatty 

 matter of the milk, with an investment of casein. The immeasurably 

 small molecules of the chyle and of the blood, are also, according to 

 II. MUller's investigation, fat globules with a protein envelop, and 

 similar vesicles may be found in most other fluids containing fat and 

 albumen in abundance. In fact, since the discovery of Ascherson 

 (MUller's ' Archiv,' 1840, p. 49), that whenever fluid fat and fluid albu- 

 men are shaken together, the fat globules which are formed always 



certainly be regarded as structures which are not derived directly from the metamorphosis of 

 cells. We are inclined also to believe, that the opinion of Reichert, Donders, and Virchow, 

 as to the nature of the connective tissue deserves much more attention than Professor Kolli- 

 ker seems disposed to bestow on it. See §§ on Connective and Elastic Tissues. — Trs.] 



