124 
SEAT AND NATURE OF FARCY. 
at the time when it commences growing soft in its centre, and is 
about to become adherent to the skin, and sometimes before it has 
adhered, we may observe (providing the recent internal process of 
liquefaction be not completed) that its circumferent parts still re- 
tain the white fibrous indurated texture which formerly constituted 
the entire bud, and that within its interior is inclosed a pultaceous 
matter, of a yellow or dingy white colour, or else slightly reddened. 
At length, when the process of softening is completed, and before 
it is converted into abscess, we find that, within the bud, several 
little morbid productions, united by lamina one to another (ar- 
ranged in concentric layers, and resembling adventitious serous 
membranes slightly infiltrated, whose raw interior gives the ap- 
pearance of ulceration to its inner surface), concur to form the walls 
of the abscess, inclosing a white, thick, homogeneous matter, whose 
consistence, varying a good deal, is at one time caseous, at another 
puriform, at another analogous to that of thick jelly (bouillie).” 
The peculiar well-known spheroid shape of the farcy-bud, as 
well as that of the pustule which succeeds it, is proved to be owing 
to the existence of the valves within the lymphatic vessel, they 
preserving their integrity while the coats of the lymphatic are 
vanishing through absorption. Coleman said the valves were 
insusceptible of irritation and consequent inflammation from farcy, 
and alleged as one reason for this, their being structures organized 
in a less degree than the tunics of the vessel. In some cases — 
such probably as would be regarded as unhealthy or ill-conditioned 
constitutions — we know that the valves, as well as the tunics, do 
however inflame and ulcerate, or become absorbed ; and that, in 
consequence, the farcy pustules run one into each other, and by 
such communication lose their characteristic shape, lengthening 
into fistulous abscesses, well known to farriers under the denomi- 
nation of “ farcy pipes,” or spreading into abscesses of large and 
irregular shape, burrowing deep in the connecting cellular tissue. 
The Skin — the cutis vera — undergoes changes very analogous 
to the thickening and induration of the farcy-bud. In the course 
of time it becomes enormously augmented in substance, remark- 
ably white, and unusually tough and hard, cutting like so much 
white leather rather than skin, especially in the immediate vicinity 
of the buds ; several of the more superficial of which, some that 
have become pustules, will be found embedded in its thickened 
substance. We, however, no sooner cut through the indurated 
cartilaginous-like cutis than we expose chains of farcy-buds and 
pustules, immediately underneath it, invested by cellular tissue 
full of infiltration of a jelly-like citron-coloured fluid, beyond 
which bed of effusion we appear suddenly to lose all vestiges of 
disease. To this, however, there are exceptions. In inveterate 
