742 INTERNAL SECRETIONS AND PRESERVATION OF LIFE. 



denly allowing enough of the latter to escape? As the need 

 asserts itself, impressed by the surrounding fluids upon the 

 sentient exposecl protoplasm of the leucocyte, thence commu- 

 nicated to its centrosphere one, two, or many granules are 

 unloaded, each being followed by a jet of the trypsin-laden fluid, 

 but a jet only commensurate with the potential of the granule. 



And experimental evidence is not lacking to show that such 

 a process must prevail when toxics stimulate the adrenal sys- 

 tem: "Under the influence of the repeated doses of pilocar- 

 pine," writes George Wilkinson, 79 in a study of the action of 

 drugs on the leucocytes of the blood, "the granules become 

 gradually less distinct, and eventually the protoplasm appears 

 perfectly homogeneous and takes up the stain very feebly. In 

 one of the animals this change was found to be very pronounced 

 in so short a time as fifteen minutes after the first dose of the 

 drug." All the work done in connection with cytolysis, espe- 

 cially that bearing upon red corpuscles, emphasizes not only 

 the need of the mechanism we have outlined, but its presence. 

 Indeed, all cells would be submitted to the destructive process 

 to which these cells succumb when "fresh serum" is added even 

 in vitro to the blood of "prepared" animals were it absent. 

 In the light of our own views, we have here merely an exag- 

 gerated phenomenon, but a true picture of what would occur 

 were fibrinogen, trypsin, and the oxidizing substance promis- 

 cuously mixed, as they are in extra cor pore experiments. Here 

 many red corpuscles, gorged perhaps with oxyhaBmoglobin and 

 enmeshed in fibrin filaments replete with phosphorus, suddenly 

 find themselves imbedded, when fresh serum is added, in what 

 is to them a seething mass. The leucocytes contributing their 

 trypsin in the manner defined by Metchnikoff, and the ag- 

 gressiveness of this corroding body being suddenly multiplied 

 thirtyfold, as observed by de Dugern, the red cell soon suc- 

 cumbs, adding its own oxyhaemoglobin to the destructive me- 

 dium surrounding it as soon as its stroma has been sufficiently 

 disintegrated. 



Such a fate for all vulnerable elements we deemed in- 

 evitable when, in the foregoing chapter, we discussed Buchner's 



79 George Wilkinson: British Medical Journal, Sept. 26, 1896. 



