Page:Natural History Review (1861).djvu/498

486 of our composite from our Anglicised word "tautologous," we would call these growths "tautogeneous." As just hinted, they admit of a two-fold rationale. The blood either needs, as in the case I shall proceed to detail, an excess of some material, or it possesses some material in excess over its requirements; in either case "tautogeneous" growths spring up, in the one case to elaborate, in the other to consume, that excess of material. The history of pathological tumours is but an illustration of the latter of these divisions. The severity of our struggle for existence has called into being so rigid a law of parsimony, as to render it difficult to give illustrations of this class of tautogeneous growths from physiological nutrition. But though difficult, it is not impossible. I proceed to illustrate the former of these two divisions by an account of certain structures observed by me in a recent dissection of a young porpoise.

The animal was a young Phocæna communis, but it had attained at least fourth-fifths of its full size, weighing as it did 60 lbs. and being 47$1⁄4$ inches in length.

On either side the aorta, just where it became free from the diaphragm, on passing into the abdomen, two elongated bodies were to be seen, lying in close contact with the posterior part of its calibre for a length of as much as three inches. Their width was about the fourth of an inch, and this width was maintained for their entire length. Their external surface was smooth, only a little lobulated at their upper end and internal margin. They possessed a readily detachable fibro-cellular capsule. They were reddish in colour, firm to the touch, on section at first homogeneous, but subsequently showing to careful inspection numerous orifices of cut vessels, though very little fibrous stroma. Their upper ends lay behind, and in contact with the posterior half of each supra-renal capsule. This relation will show that the structures in question could not have been abnormally persistent Wolffian bodies, which indeed further particulars will yet further prove.

These structures, when examined by the microscope, were seen to be all but wholly made up of such cells as we get from the Malpighian bodies in the spleen, or indeed from the cortical part of a lymphatic gland, namely, circular nucleated cells with granular contents, of a size somewhat less than that of a red blood corpuscle.

Functionally, these structures may be regarded as identical with lymphatic glands; morphologically, I consider them different; on account, first, of their symmetrically elongated tongue-like shape, all but entirely smooth and unlobulated, and secondly, on account of their encapsulation in an external coat of fibro-cellular tissue, and their want of such supporting elements within their parenchyma.