ON THE EARLY STAGES OF INFLAMMATION 217 
was due to increased fibrine in solution, rendering the liquor sanguinis abnor- 
mally viscid, and so operating like the admixture of gum above alluded to. 
But the fact that the corpuscles aggregate as closely after the fibrine has been 
removed as before, appears quite opposed to such a view. I have examined 
many drops of my own blood, before and after the removal of its fibrine, with 
the special object of ascertaining this point, and have never been able to detect 
any material difference between the aggregation in the two sets of cases. In 
the blood of the bat before mentioned, which was probably suffering consti- 
tutionally from inflammation, the corpuscles continued to retain their excessive 
adhesiveness for a whole hour after coagulation of the fibrine. I once made 
a similar observation on a specimen of horse’s blood,! which, as is well known, 
presents the buffy coat in the state of health. Having divided the clot vertically 
several hours after coagulation had occurred, my attention was attracted, on 
looking at the section, by minute red points, like grains of sand, lying in the 
lower part of the buff, just above the coloured portion of the coagulum. On 
microscopic examination of a small piece containing some of them, they proved, as 
I expected, to be masses of aggregated red corpuscles, but with the peculiarity of 
being compact and globular instead of presenting the usual appearance of a net- 
work of rouleaux, and it was evident that the corpuscles had been excessively 
adhesive at the time when aggregation took place. Some of the red discs 
were now squeezed out from the fibrinous mass in which they lay, and as they 
escaped into the surrounding serum they at once adhered firmly in that fluid, 
forming again compact globular masses, such as, if in freshly drawn blood, 
would necessarily give rise to the buffy coat ; so that their adhesiveness seemed 
to have been in no way affected by the withdrawal of the fibrine from solution. 
It may of course be urged, that the fibrine, when in solution, may have impressed 
upon the corpuscles an adhesiveness which they retained after soaking for hours 
in serum, but this seems a very unlikely hypothesis. I suspect, therefore, that 
the peculiarities of the corpuscles of inflammatory blood are the result of other 
changes than the excess of fibrine. 
From the facts detailed in this section, it appears that the aggregation of 
the corpuscles of blood removed from the body depends on their possessing a 
certain degree of mutual adhesiveness, which is much greater in the colourless 
globules than in the red discs; and that, in the latter, this property, though 
apparently not depending upon vitality, is capable of remarkable variations in 
consequence of very slight chemical changes in the liquor sanguinis. 
1 This observation was made subsequently to the reading of the paper, viz. in November 1857. 
