1906.] Liver Cells to the Blood-vessels and Lymphatics. 485 



lying between capillary walls and the liver cells. Disse looked upon them 

 as helping with connective-tissue fibrils to form the walls of perivascular 

 lymphatics. 



In 1898, Kupffer (38) returned to the subject, and stated that he had been 

 mistaken in assigning to the " Sternzellen " an extravascular position, he 

 now believes that they are an integral part of the blood capillary wall. 

 Kupffer found that 12 hours after the injection of defibrinated (rabbit's) 

 blood into the vein of a rabbit, red blood corpuscles are to be seen lying 

 inside the endothelial cells of the capillaries of the portal vein. In older 

 animals, he states, it is not rare to find the capillary walls thickened, and the 

 injection of perivascular spaces from the lymphatics may be due to the 

 injection mass lifting off an adventitial layer from the capillary tube. As 

 a result of his later observations Kupffer concluded that, in the capillary 

 walls of the liver, there are two forms of nuclei, one spherical or ellipsoidal 

 and the other quite flat ; the large nuclei belong to cells which are rich in 

 protoplasm, the small flat nuclei to cells which have relatively little proto- 

 plasm. The endothelium of the capillary wall has the appearance of a 

 syncytium, and it is impossible to demonstrate limits between individual 

 cells. The capillary wall appears to be made up of a continuous thin 

 lamella in which the protoplasm is arranged as a network of threads with 

 nuclei-holding nodes ; larger accumulations of protoplasm surround the large 

 nuclei, and there is less protoplasm round the flat nuclei. The "Stern- 

 zellen " belong to the endothelium of the portal vein, and in gold prepara- 

 tions are shown up by the arrangement of protoplasm round the endothelial 

 nuclei. This protoplasm possesses the power of phagocytosis, and foreign 

 bodies and red blood corpuscles are taken up by it from the blood and 

 broken into fine particles. 



About the same time that Kupffer's later results appeared, Browicz (11) 

 described in the human liver and in the liver of the dog long and voluminous 

 cells which lie close to the capillary wall and project into its lumen. He 

 found that these cells are phagocytic, and frequently contain red and white 

 blood corpuscles and granules of pigment, and he identified them with cells 

 containing blood corpuscles found by Silbermann in the liver-blood of 

 children suffering from jaundice, and with phagocytic cells also occurring free 

 in the liver-capillaries of ducks and geese, and described by Minkowsky and 

 Naunyn. Browicz states that the cells do not form a continuous layer 

 on the wall of the capillary, and that the latter is sometimes seen lying 

 between them and the adjacent liver cells ; in some pathological conditions 

 they even give rise to emboli in the blood-vessels. 



In a later paper Browicz (8) identified the cells he had described with 



