20 THE MICROSCOPIST. 



anatomists in this city. Again, who would have imagined that 

 porrigo favosa, mentagra, aphtha, and other diseases, consist of 

 cryptogamous plants growing on the skin or mucous mem- 

 branes ? Surely facts like these hold out a strong inducement 

 to the histologist who prosecutes pathological inquiries." In 

 another place he relates the following circumstance, which tends 

 to illustrate the same point : " A gentleman who had an ab- 

 scess in the arm, observed one morning his urine to be turbid, 

 and to deposit a considerable sediment. The practitioner who 

 attended him thought it looked like purulent matter, but before 

 finally forming his diagnosis, he asked me to examine it with 

 the microscope. I did so ; but instead of finding pus corpus- 

 cles, discovered a large quantity of irregularly formed granules, 

 which I recognised to be fibrinous. I immediately suggested 

 that the abscess was on the point of resolution, and I after- 

 wards learned, that from that time it rapidly disappeared. 

 The fact that fibrin exuded into the tissues, and, subsequently 

 absorbed, passes off by the kidneys, was determined by the 

 microscopic observations of Schonlein and Zimmerman in Ger- 

 many/' 



Many other instances might be adduced, were it necessary, 

 to show the importance of the microscope in diagnosis and in 

 practical medicine. It is not too much to hazard the assertion, 

 that in a few years the practitioner will find it as essential in 

 finding out the nature of disease, and the state of the system, 

 as the most valuable articles of the niateria medica are useful 

 in medical treatment. The following example will illustrate 

 the delicacy as well as utility of this mode of investigation. 

 A few evenings since, while entertaining a friend with some 

 microscopic views, he expressed a wish to see the red globules 

 of the blood ; so, pricking the tip of his finger with a lancet, a 

 drop was extracted, which, after covering with thin glass, was 

 placed upon the stage of the microscope. Observing the glo- 



