consequent upon Inflammations of acute local Character. 189 



are. But among the finely granular there may be sometimes included 

 the scanty basophil cells which are so rare as hardly really to be 

 considered normal hsemic leucocytes. It must be remembered that 

 Howell* and Gullandf have shown that in its earliest history the 

 blood is devoid of all leucocytes. Essentially all the haemic leuco- 

 cytes are therefore vagrants wandering through blood as through the 

 other tissues ; thus it becomes difficult to set a sharp line between 

 leucocytes normally hsemio and leucocytes only abnormally hffimic. 

 Ehrlich includes the basophil cell as an occasional haemic leucocyte. 

 Basophil cells I have seen in the blood of an emaciated dog which was 

 undergoing treatment by thyroid injections after thyroidectomy. That 

 subvariety of basophil cells termed by Ehrlich " mastzellen," I have 

 never met with in normal mammalian blood, but I have found them 

 sparsely in the blood of patients dying in the reaction stage of Asiatic 

 cholera, J and at that time the inflamed submucosa and mucosa of 

 the intestine I found often contain large numbers of these cells. 



B. The Coarsely Granular Leucocyte. 



This is among the largest of the leucocytes. 



Nucleus is usually somewhat less deeply stained by nuclear dyes 

 than the nucleus of the finely granular leucocyte ; is often reniform, 

 often irregular, and appearances intermediate between the reniform 

 and completely irregular are common. The nucleus is always more 

 or less obvious even when the living cell is spheroid because of ab- 

 sence of the characteristic granulation in its region. 



Cell-body, in its greater part, contains a number of granules, more 

 or less regularly arranged. The granules are highly refracting (es- 

 pecially in the cat, but much less so in the horse) ; the granules vary 

 in size considerably in the same individual cell,, but usually the 

 largest is not more than thrice the size of the smallest. The shape 

 of the granules is usually in the- rabbit and dog spherical, in the cat 

 cylindroid, in the horse roughly cuboid, but in the cat and horse 

 many spheroid granules are often present. The average size of the 

 cell is about the same in these three types, but the cylindroid granule 

 of the cat is larger than the spheroid of the dog, and the cuboid 

 granule of the horse is much larger (diameter about 2/t 4/t) than the 

 cylindroid of the cat. In the normal cell the granules never exhibit 

 Brownian movement, but in abnormal conditions Brownian move- 

 ment sets the particles dancing freely. Under imbibition the granules 

 usually lie trembling in the surface-sheet of the cell-body, but some- 



* " The Life History of the Formed Elements of the Blood," ' Journ. Morph.,' 

 vol. 4, p. 1, 1890. 

 t Op. eit. 

 I ' Hoy. Soc. Proc.,' 1886. 



