INFLAMMATION. 
167 
made stump. He will find the structure weakened, so that it 
easily gives way with pressure or traction ; he will see under the 
microscope that the substance tends to fall into irregular frag¬ 
ments ; that its natural striation is more or less replaced, first by 
an almost homogeneous appearance, and afterwards by an appear¬ 
ance of aggregated granules ; that with these granules of albu¬ 
minous matter into which the muscle has resolved itself, there is 
mixed, even from an early date in the inflammation, a noticeable 
quantity of minute oil-drops; that often these oil-drops appear 
before the disintegration of muscle has made much progress, and 
then arrange themselves in such mutual relation, transverse or 
longitudinal, as to suggest that the sarcous elements have changed 
themselves, particle by particle, into oil; that little by little the 
oil-drops multiply to such an extent as to be the chief visible ob¬ 
jects—the limitary membrane of a fasciculus seeming now to be 
almost tilled with finely-divided oil, diffused through some scanty 
connective albuminous material; that the limitary membrane 
within which the muscular material is thus emulsionized, tends 
also itself to undergo dissolution, and let its proceeds confuse 
themselves with the similar debris of neighboring fasciculi, till 
more or less bulk of muscle is reduced to a state of oleo-albumin- 
ous liquidity. 
“ And from this point, if the observer have opportunity of 
watching the changes which lead to convalescence, he will see 
that gradually the liquefied material diminishes in volume ; that 
in proportion as it vanishes, the adjoining parts adapt themselves 
to the altered relation; that eventually only a scar-like puckering 
of substance—a kind of tendinous intersection—remains to mark 
the place where muscular material has irrecoverably melted 
away. 
“ Let him examine inflamed bone, as, for instance, in a cari¬ 
ous vertebra. He will see that t 1 e structure breaks down under 
his finger, and offers scarcely any resistance to a knife; that the 
microscopical texture is rarefied—cancelli canals lacunae being 
all larger than natural, and the solid framework all scantier; that 
the material is tending to break into its component parts and to 
undergo changes which admit of its being removed by the cir¬ 
culation. 
