214 
A. BABB. 
tics and the actual cautery stimulate indolent parts by substi¬ 
tuting acute inflammation for lethargy. 
Specific microbes, or their spores, on entering the circula¬ 
tion, after the expiration of their period of incubation, inflame 
the parts on which they expend their force by a sort of elective 
affinity, and thus produce some one of a large number of dis¬ 
eases whose origin till the last decade was involved in mystery. 
Thrombi, when detached from the seat of their formation, 
often cause embolic infarction and subsequent inflammation. 
Prolonged maceration, as seen in the too persistent tubbing 
of the legs of track horses, or in the extremities of cart horses 
exposed to mud and water daily, frequently produces a verit¬ 
able dermatitis. 
In fine, any active congestion, other than physiological, if 
not cut short by appropriate treatment, is liable to merge into 
inflammation with all its dire consequences. 
PATHOLOGY. —The blood plays a most important role in the 
phenomena of inflammation, hence it is advisable to turn some 
attention to it. The vital fluid is composed of a watery portion 
called plasma, or liquor sanguinis, and a solid, made up of four 
distinct microscopic bodies, the corpuscles. 
These are the ordinary red blood cells or haemocytes; the 
white cells or leucocytes; Hayem’s hmmatoblasts and the in¬ 
visible corpuscles of Norris. 
The red blood cell of the horse, discoid in shape, is only 
1-4500 inch in diameter, but it makes up in number for its 
minuteness, as careful estimates show that the enormous amount 
of about 5,000,000 of them exist in a cube of blood, the one 
25th of an inch on its edge. 
The leucocyte is globular in form, possesses amoeboid move¬ 
ments, and is the 1-2500 of an inch in diameter. It exists in 
healthy blood in the proportion of one to each 500 of the red. 
I11 1878, Hayem described small, spherical, colorless bodies 
which he found in the blood and named haematoblasts. 
There is one haematoblast to each twenty red blood corpus¬ 
cles. 
