82 
Transactions of the Royal Microscopical Society. 
the slide optically continuous, we get a new view of bacterial fluid. 
On looking into the microscope, the field is seen — clear as a glass 
tank in which thousands of minute fish are disporting themselves. 
Just as, in the heavens, a mass of nebula is resolved by the great 
reflector into a universe of stars, so, in the field of the microscope, 
an unweighable particle of foggy fluid is transformed by this para- 
boloid illuminator into a limpid pool tenanted by myriads of atomies. 
These atomies, if they have any theories of the future, must be 
thinking that a final conflagration of the universe has commenced. 
Observers may watch them as, on a summer evening, with soft 
white clouds behind and pure sky in front, hoys look into a clear 
pool and see the life of the frogs and the minnows. Immeasurable 
in their minuteness, these atomies gyrate upon the field, and from 
point to point they urge their way with vast activity. Some of 
them appear like winged creatures, others are furnished with 
whorls of cilia, and some are seen as amoeboid masses lazily 
digesting particles of solid matter. 
Blood and saliva also may be seen as new objects. If fresh 
transparent blood-serum with a few corpuscles shaken out of the 
edge of the clot be viewed, the serum is seen filled with a nebulous 
haze of points, as is mote-laden air. in a sunbeam or in the electric 
light. Isolated corpuscles appear as lenticular or flattened spheroidal 
masses of pale red amoeboid matter. Other corpuscles have massed 
themselves into large rouleaux — not nummiform, but like rouleaux 
of dried figs — their exterior outlines showing as if their whole 
surface were self-luminous, the septa persisting and the corpuscles 
being easily separable. On pressure, the corpuscles fuse into large 
amoeboid masses, and may be again broken up into corpuscles of 
various sizes, some small, some large, but not otherwise distinguish- 
able from the original corpuscles. It may be that blood-corpuscles 
are formed mechanically by the capillaries through which the blood 
with its amoeboid matter is continually being lashed, and that their 
continual re-coalescence is prevented by some modification of their 
exterior which is produced by the action of the serum. If this be 
so, the size of the corpuscles in various animals will prove to be a 
measure, in some simple ratio, of the calibre of their capillaries. I 
have just examined some blood taken from a gentleman dying of 
malignant pustule of the upper lip, and for whose treatment I have 
met Dr. Gomer Davies, of Bayswater, several days in consultation. 
The blood was drawn by myself twelve hours before death from a 
puncture in the cheek near the local disease, and was venous in 
colour. The tube was of Bohemian glass, heated to redness in a 
Bunsen burner, then drawn out and hermetically sealed. The 
points were broken off immediately before drawing the blood up 
into it, and were again at once hermetically sealed. Six hours 
afterwards I broke open the tube and examined the serum with 
