CHAP, xxvn.] DR. CARPENTER'S HYPOTHESIS. 305 



Liebig, however, does not explain why the hsematine is invariably 

 contained in a multitude of nucleated cells. The consideration of 

 this point seems to us to afford the clue to determine the real func- 

 tion of the red particles. 



The true office of the red blood-corpuscles would, probably, be 

 most correctly described as that of forming or secreting the hcema- 

 tine, which in the greatest part of the animal kingdom is coloured, 

 but which even, though colourless, appears to contain iron. These 

 particles are floating gland-cells, as Henle suggested some years 

 ago ; they are in all essential points of structure like the secreting 

 cells of true glands, and there is no reason why, free and floating 

 in a liquid like the liquor sanguinis, they may not exercise upon 

 materials dissolved in that fluid, an influence analogous to that ex- 

 ercised by the elementary particles of the liver, or the kidney, or the 

 pancreas upon the blood. The matter secreted by the blood-cells is 

 the hsematine, which term we would here use to signify not merely 

 the colouring matter but the entire contents of the blood-corpuscle, 

 of which iron is an important, if not an essential ingredient, and 

 which is coloured in the vertebrata and in some of the inverte- 

 brata. It is this hsematime which plays an important part in the 

 attraction of oxygen, and which by its colouring matter also 

 exercises some important influence on the whole economy, for 

 there seems no other source from whence can be derived all 

 that pigment which is diffused throughout various textures, such 

 as muscle, the nervous centres, the skin and its appendages, the 

 eye, &c., but that which is formed in such great quantity in the 

 blood. 



Office of the Colourless Corpuscles. If these particles do not con- 

 stitute an early stage of development of the colourless corpuscles, 

 it is clear that they must be viewed as performing some special 

 function in the blood, independently of the latter. R. Wagner 

 viewed them as identical with chyle and lymph corpuscles, and 

 assuming that in the invertebrata no coloured particles existed, 

 he regarded the blood in such animals as identical with chyle or 

 lymph ; as, in fact, the latter fluid not yet elaborated into blood. 

 In the blood of vertebrata, therefore, he would view these par- 

 ticles as chyle or lymph globules not yet transformed into blood 

 particles. 



But Dr. Carpenter has put forward a more elaborate hypothesis 

 respecting the office of the white corpuscles. This able physiologist 

 regards these particles as the agents in the development of fibrine 

 in the blood, or in the conversion of albumen or other materials of 



