610 
REMARKS ON “ A LECTURE 
ulceration has made. As fast as the deficiences are made good, 
the remnants of skin — if any be left — are stretched abroad to cover 
them ; and soon, here and there, will little insulated patches of 
hair be seen springing up on such parts as still retain the 
pilous bulbs entire. Such places as the old skin, by a natural 
process of stretching or spreading — “ contracting,” as it is called 
— cannot be made to cover, must be furnished with new skin ; 
and skin-making is not only a tardy but an expensive process 
in the animal economy : at least, so we have a right to argue 
it to be, from the space of time it occupies, and the evident 
efforts of Nature to make the most of the old skin. What 
with the stretching or spreading of the old, and the formation 
of the new skin in barely sufficient breadth to meet the de- 
mands of the case, the healed cicatrized part has a tense and com- 
pact feel it did not possess before, and this apparent tightening of 
the skin it is which, as it is said, “ acts as a bandage” — bracing and 
“ strengthening” the fired part. I suspect, however, a good deal 
of fallacy in this assumption of “ bandage.” The inflammation so 
long pervading these parts has caused effusion of adhesive matter 
into the subcutaneous cellular tissue, the result of which is agglu- 
tination of the cutis vera to the parts underneath — the periosteum, 
peri-chondrium, tendinous thecce, &c., which agglutinated condition 
of parts it is that, in the absence of the cellular connexion through 
which they obtained motion upon one another before, gives the 
skin the sensation of being tightened or braced: relaxation of it 
not again taking place until the solid effusion into the cells of the 
subcutaneous reticular membrane becomes absorbed. 
[To be continued.] 
REMARKS ON “A LECTURE ON THE ORGANIZATION 
OF LIVING BEINGS,” 
BY MR. PEARSON B. FERGUSON, VETERINARY SURGEON, BACHELOR^ 
WALK, DUBLIN; AND PUBLISHED IN THE “VETERINARY 
RECORD” OF JULY 1846 . 
By Mr. HAYCOCK, Veterinary Surgeon, Member of the Vete- 
rinary College, Edinburgh, King-street, Huddersfield. 
“ They would think themselves miserable in a patched coat, and yet their minds 
appear in a piebald livery of coarse patches and borrowed shreds.” — Locke. 
Messrs. Editors, 
Sirs, — ONE of the many annoyances which beset the path of men 
eminent in science and literature is that of having their published 
thoughts and observations pilfered by a number of miserable 
