90 NATURE AND LIFE. 



The case with morbid humors is the same as with mor- 

 bid tissues. They are derived from healthy humors by 

 similar processes, and they contain no principles foreign to 

 the system only they are produced in places where they 

 should not be produced, and in a proportion which ac- 

 counts for the disorders they bring on. The fluids of the 

 various dropsies, for instance, proceed from hypergenesis 

 of normal serous products, which are extracted from the 

 blood by serous membranes, such as the pleura and the 

 peritoneum. Pus is formed by a blastema issuing from the 

 subcutaneous cellular tissue, and within which the white 

 globules originate. 1 The contents of the various liquid 

 cysts are similarly produced at the expense of the blood- 

 plasma by a true hypersecretion. These morbid humors 

 do not rid the system of some subtile and noxious principle, 

 as it used to be taught ; they form under the effect of an al- 

 teration of the blood, of some disturbance of circulation, or 

 of irregularity in the acts either of secretion or of excretion. 



Ancient physiology and ancient medicine have by 

 turns preached solidism and humorism, that is to say, the 

 exclusive predominance either of the solids or of the 

 fluids, in the effecting of vital phenomena. Neither of 

 these systems is sustained by facts. The tissues and the 

 humors play equally active and important parts in the or- 

 ganism, and disease has its source in the alterations which 

 occur in the latter, as well as in disturbances affecting the 



1 Some authors who had heretofore believed that globules of pus grow 

 by proliferation out of the elements of the tissue called the conjunctive, 

 have of late found themselves obliged to give up that explanation, 

 which conformed too to the cellular theory, and they have adopted an- 

 other extremely ingenious one, which consists in assuming that these 

 globules come from the blood, without, however, having ever proved how 

 they are produced in that blood. Besides, they forget too to explain 

 how, in certain cases, collections of pus form in which there are five or 

 six times as many leucocytes as there were in the whole mass of blood 

 that served to form them. 



