LYMPHATIC GLANDS. 251 



the coats of the lymphatic vessels, so that we here find the 

 requisites to form a lymphatic gland ; for as we prove that 

 many of the lymphatic glands in the human body are no more 

 than a congeries of arteries, veins, nerves, and lymphatic vessels 

 convoluted, it is probable that all lymphatic glands may be 

 formed in the same manner ; so, perhaps, it may be the same 

 thing in nature, or the same purposes of the animal economy may 

 be equally well answered, whether the parts composing a gland 

 (viz. arteries, veins, nerves,- and lymphatic vessels) be circum- 

 scribed in a proper membrane, or spread over a larger surface. 

 This, perhaps, will be more fully proved by some experiments 

 and observations which I shall hereafter publish on the minute 

 structure of glands (cxx). 



SECT. 15. On cutting into a fresh lymphatic gland we find 

 it contains a thickish, white, milky fluid. Then if we carefully 

 wipe or wash this fluid from any part of the cut surface, and 

 examine it attentively in the microscope, we observe an almost 

 infinite number of small cells, not such as have been before 

 described, or that have been supposed to exist in the lymphatic 

 glands, but others too small to become visible to the naked eye, 

 and expressed in Plate VIII, fig. 4. 



SECT. 16. If the arteries and veins of a lymphatic gland 

 have been previously injected with a coloured fluid, and a part 

 of the gland be then \iewed through the microscope, we ob- 

 serve these cells are extremely vascular, and it is into these 

 cells that the white fluid found in the gland is secreted. This 

 fluid is absorbed by the lymphatic vessels, which we observed 

 (Sect. 7) arose from the cells of the gland, and is by them, in 

 common with the other fluids, carried into the course of the 

 circulation. 



SECT. 17. The lymphatic vessels, therefore, which originate 

 from the cells of the gland, are in the lymphatic glands ana- 

 logous to the excretory ducts of other glands ; and we have the 



(cxx.) I apprehend Mr. Falconar did not live to fulfil this promise, 

 although he devoted some space to the subject in the 8vo Synopsis of his 

 Lectures, dated from Craven street, Strand, London, Sept. 26, 1/77. 

 He must have died within a month afterwards ; for the sale catalogue of 

 " The Museum of the late Magnus Falconar, Surgeon and Professor 

 of Anatomy .... formed by the joint labour of these two young 

 anatomists," Hewson and Falconar is dated on the following 12th of 

 October. Of this catalogue there is a copy in the library at the Royal 

 College of Surgeons, in Lincoln's Inn Fields. 



