KH) Prof C. S. Sherrington. On Changes in the Blood 



times they are withdrawn in a mass to the neighbourhood of the 

 nucleus which is often excentric in the cell. It is possible, with care, 

 when the grannies are dancing at the surface of the cell, to so hold 

 the cell between object slide and cover-slip that the dancing of the 

 granules at the upper and under poles of the cell is arrested while 

 the dancing in the equatorial region is unhindered. This proves, I 

 think, not only that the granules are then very close to the surface of 

 the cell, bat that they lie not free under a cell membrane as Ranvier* 

 suggests, but actually in a thin cortical layer of the cell. 



As to the nature of the substance composing these granules, the 

 idea put forward by A. Schmidt,"}" that it is closely allied to haemo- 

 globin, has by PouchetJ and Hayem been pushed so far as for them 

 to consider the grannies to be haemoglobin and pieces of broken chromo- 

 cytes. That it is not actually haemoglobin is proved by the absence 

 of colour from it. Ehrlich and Schwarze|| have also found it does 

 not give the staining reactions of the chromocytes. The granules 

 tinge yellow over osmic vapour, but various reactions show that they 

 are not fat. They contain a certain amount of water (Ehrlich 

 and Schwarze) ; they are not soluble in alcohol or ether. In the 

 dried corpuscles they melt (?) and run together, but at a very high 

 temperature only (Ehrlich). As the water is driven off from them 

 by slow heat they display a greater and greater affinity for acid 

 stains (Schwarze). In the living cell they, in rabbit's bipod, became 

 deeply tinted (to a maroon colour) on irrigation with dilute Ehrlich- 

 Biondi stain. In the fresh condition in the cat's blood, mixed with 

 dilute aqueous methyl blue, it has often appeared to me, when using 

 powerful systems, that each granule is coated with a thin film of sub- 

 stance which becomes blue-violet with this basic dye, and also will 

 stain with acid fnchsin, a film, in fact, of amphophil substance. I 

 find the granule is soluble in acetic acid, but not in distilled water. 

 It appears to give the ammoniomolybdate reaction used to reveal 

 phosphorus by Lilienfeld and Monti^f. The granulation of the finely 

 granular leucocyte does not yield this reaction, though the cell-body 

 of the hyaline leucocyte does usually give a faint reaction. The 

 granules of the coarsely granular leucocyte yield the reaction readily 

 without, previous treatmeut to liberate the phosphorus. The granules 



Op. dt., p. 168. 



t ' Arch. f. d. Qesammte Physiologic,' vol. 9, p. 353. 



J ' Journ. de 1'Anat. et de la Physiologic,' 1880. 



' Du Sang,' Paris, 1889. 



|| Op.cit. 



1 ' Verhandlungen der Physiologiachen Gesellschaft zu Berlin,' Sitzung i 



Juni, 1892. Professor Halliburton, who has had considerable experience of the 

 microscopical application of this test for phosphorus, has been so kind as to look 

 OTer some of my preparations, and he endorses the opinion that the reaction u 

 giren faiutly but distinctly by the coarse oxyphil granule. 



