INFLAMMATION. 
109 
then begins to diminish, and may continue until complete stasis 
in the capillaries is effected. This result is not usual except when 
the action produced by an irritant is intense. 
While the slowing of the circulation continues, the white 
blood corpuscles are seen accumulating along the inner surface of 
the veins until they nearly fill them. 
The red blood corpuscles also accumulate, but principally in 
the capillaries. Thus these vessels become almost choked by the 
suspended movements of these minute bodies. The obstructed 
vessels cause the circulating current to become slower and 
slower until in many of the vessels it is almost completely 
arrested. 
The intensely interesting phenomenon of corpuscle migration 
now takes place. This is the moment in which the eye of the 
observer will be intently fixed on the outer surface of the vessel. 
To quote Prof. Conheim’s words, “ Here and there minute color¬ 
less button-shaped elevations spring just as if they were produced 
by budding out of the wall of the vessel itself. The buds in¬ 
crease gradually and slowly in size, until each assumes the form 
of a hemispherical projection of width corresponding to that of a 
leucocyte. Eventually the hemisphere is convertedjinto a pear- 
shaped body, the stalk end of which is still attached to the sur¬ 
face of the vein, while the round part projects freely. Gradu¬ 
ally the little mass of protoplasm moves itself further and further 
away, and as it does so begins to shoot out delicate prongs of 
transparent protoplasm from its surface in nowise differing in 
their aspect from the slender thread by which it is still moored 
to the vessel. Finally the thread is severed, and the pro¬ 
cess is complete. The observer has before him an emigrant 
leucocyte.” 
Conheim’s conclusion drawn from the foregoing facts, is that 
all corpuscles found in the inflamed tissue outside of the vessels 
during the first stage of acute inflammation, are those that have 
escaped from the blood-vessels, as before described. But this 
does not preclude the probability that they originate, in a later 
stage of the process, in the manner advocated by Virchow; that 
is, by proliferation from pre-existing cells, in the tissues outside 
of the blood-vessels. 
