344? Dr. Pearson on expectorated Matter. 
drink of fermented liquor ; and it is as little likely to be de- 
stroyed, as the muriate of soda also induced in the very same 
way. But our food and drink do not, commonly at least, con- 
tain the scda united to a destructible acid, or an oxide. 
g. It is plain, from the preceding experiments, that expec- 
torated matter belongs to the class of coagulable fluids, and 
not of gelatinizable, or, as commonly asserted, mucous fluids. 
It differs from the coagulable fluid, serum of blood, in form- 
ing a much thicker fluid with a much larger proportion of 
water : for serum and also the water of blisters, is quite liquid, 
although they afford, on exsiccation, one twelfth to one ele- 
venth of their weight of brittle residue, while some kinds of 
expectorated matter, of the consistence of mucilage, afford 
only one fortieth of dry residue, and others of the consistence 
of thin paste, afford only one fourteenth of residue. 
20. But for the unavoidable extent of this paper, I should 
trouble the learned Society with various other conclusions and 
remarks, especially concerning the globularity of expectorated 
matter, which seems to indicate organization. Although An- 
tonius Van Lewenhoeck, above a century ago, discovered 
the globularity of the blood, and even noticed it in other ani- 
mal fluids, neither he, nor any other person, as far as I know, 
investigated the subject in any fluid but the blood, till by Mr. 
Home’s acuteness and industry, at a very early period of life, 
it was observed in pus. I have in this paper related, that ex- 
pectorated matter, especially the opaque ropy kind, as well as 
the puriform,is full of globules, and that, except by such agents 
as destroy charcoal, they are scarcely destructible. Do these 
spherical particles consist chiefly of organized carbonaceous 
matter ? 
