VETERINARY SCHOOL AT ALFORT. 
579 
it be along with interstitial infiltration or in cavities bordering on 
highly organised parts. This fact, so contrary to what is generally 
admitted and believed, and needing much explanation, is par- 
ticularly interesting as it regards veterinary medical jurispru- 
dence. 
Inflammation is a modification of the nutritive functions, mani- 
festing itself in the solids with a rapidity great in proportion as 
the nutrition itself is perfect. In those parts where the nutritive 
process is energetic, as in all those organs where the cellular tissue 
is abundant and the vascularity extensive, inflammation develops 
itself with great energy, and, in a very short space of time, mani- 
fests such products as it is capable of engendering. Thus, for ex- 
ample, experiment as well as daily clinical experience demonstrate 
that in the skin, the subcutaneous cellular tissue, and the muscles, 
inflammation is in four-and-twenty hours capable of giving to the 
nutritive structure an aptitude for the formation of pus ; and that 
within a few days after its development the tissues, which are the 
seat of it, present all the characteristics of deep alteration in tex- 
ture, density, and vascularity. But those phenomena of whose 
evolution we have traces externally, are, in the same manner, tak- 
ing place in such more deeply-seated organs as present the same 
nutritive aptitudes; and it ought not to cause surprise that, in cases 
where pulmonary congestion does not act upon a vast superficies, and 
is unaccompanied by hemorrhage, the cellular texture of the organ, 
modified by inflammation in it, should, in a short space of time, 
become capable of the formation of pus, and submit to all such or- 
ganic transformations as have their origin in inflammation. In 
other words, no more time is requisite to develop these purulent 
deposits in the lungs than it takes to effect a similar pyogenic 
operation in the subcutaneous cellular tissue ; and in both these 
cases the work of organization of the walls of these purulent cavi- 
ties occupies about the same period. It is, therefore, an error to 
conclude that a lesion is of long standing because an abscess en- 
closed in a cavity, possessing walls perfectly sound, and a degree 
of induration, has been found in the lungs. A fortnight is quite 
sufficient to effect such alterations as this. The clinical facts ob- 
served this year demonstrate the truth of this assertion. The vas- 
cular state of the walls of some of the specimens, their density, 
their thickness, the organization of the false mucous membrane 
which covers the interior of the purulent cavity, all pourtray the 
differing characters between an old and recent state of the changes 
produced in the pulmonary texture by inflammation. 
But, in general, unless we have some certain indications to 
enable us to ascertain the exact period of the commencement of 
the disease, it is difficult to fix precisely the date of their origin ; 
