HYDATIDS. 489 



they escaped. This I have found more than once in the mocock's 

 abdomen 1 . 



Do these hydatids proceed from cold or indolence? Many slow 

 animals which have come to us from warm climates, die here of [or 

 with] them in the liver, lungs, &c. I opened a mocock which had a 

 great number of hydatids in the liver, some of which had escaped and 

 got loose into the cavity of the abdomen, and some of them were as low 

 down as the pelvis; many of them had adhered to the parts adjacent, 

 and there were blood-vessels passing to them from the parts to which 

 they adhered, and ramifying upon them. This shows that the external 

 coat of a hydatid is alive. This second species of hydatid I never saw 

 but in the liver or the lungs ; indeed the liver may be said to have 

 hardly any other kind of hydatid, but the lungs often have hydatids of 

 another kind ; therefore they are more peculiar to the liver than to the 

 lungs. 



Hydatids. — I saw an instance of some, of an irregular kind, in a 

 woman that was dissected in the dissecting room 2 , in the spring of 1759. 

 She was fat, and that fat very oily : the liver adhered to the diaphragm 

 upon the right side near to the transverse ligament, by long membranous 

 adhesions. I found in the substance of the liver at this part a fluid, 

 like that of an abscess surrounded everywhere by liver. On exposing 

 it, I found that the fluid was contained in a strong bag, which made 

 me suspect an hydatid. I opened it by a crucial incision, and found 

 upon the inside a slimy mucus, pretty white, as if chalk had been 

 mixed with it ; and upon the inside of this I found a cluster of hydatids, 

 but they were very much compressed and broken, and had some of the 

 white substance mixed with them. 



Sometimes hydatids are found within others, even a first, second, 

 third, and fourth, and so on. This sort of hydatid may be justly com- 

 pared to a nest of pill-boxes one within another ; and may be called a 

 simple and regular series of hydatids. 



There is another species, but much more irregular ; it has, as in the 

 former kind, the strong external membrane ; but, within this strong 

 membrane, there are a vast number of simple or single hydatids ; with 

 this difference, they are not a series of them one within another, but 

 are lying loose in the general cavity of the cyst. 



i [See pp. 28, 29.] 



2 [Dr. William Hunter's Theatre of Anatomy, Great Windmill Street.] 



