Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume XV.djvu/870

 840 IRANI TRANSFUSION OF BLOOD TRANI, a town of S. Italy, on the Adriatic, in the province and 27 in. W. N. W. of the city of Bari ; pop. in 1872, 24,388. It is the seat of an archbishop, and has an ancient and celebrated cathedral with one of the loftiest towers in Italy. The harbor was formerly very deep, but is now accessible only to small ves- sels. The trade is chiefly in oil, wine, grain, almonds, and figs. TRANQUEBAR, a town of British India, in the district of Tanjore, Madras, on an island at the mouth of the river Cavery, 147 m. S. by W. of Madras; pop. about 25,000. There are Lutheran churches, a Roman Catholic chap- el, and several schools. Tranquebar has some manufactures of cotton cloth, oil, and soap. It belonged to the Danes, but was ceded to the British in 1845. TRANSCAUCASIA. See CAUCASUS. TRANSCENDENTAL (Latin transcendere, to go beyond), in metaphysics, a term applied in general to ideas and doctrines that are not suggested or limited by experience. In the scholastic philosophy, transcendent and tran- scendentalis designated anything that was not pradicamentalis, that is, anything that rose above, was not comprehended in, and could not be defined by, either of the ten summa genera or categories of Aristotle. Thus, being was transcendental, and only some category of being was praedicamental. Kant gave new and distinct significations to transcendens and tramcendentalis. The former designated what is wholly beyond experience, is conceivable neither a priori nor a posteriori, and thus lies beyond every category of thought. The latter designated a priori conceptions and judgments, which are necessary and universal, and which transcend the sphere, while affording the con- ditions, of the contingent knowledge furnished by experience. Thus by the transcendental, formal, or critical philosophy of Kant is meant his system of the principles of the pure reason, which occupies itself not with the objects or matter of knowledge, but with the subjective ideas or forms, as time, space, substance, and causality, through which objects are repre- sented to us as phenomena. Objects in them- selves (Dinge an sicK) he deemed transcendent. In mathematics, transcendental quantities are those which cannot be expressed by a finite number of algebraic terms, but are represented by means either of logarithms, or variable ex- ponents, or some of the trigonometrical func- tions. Transcendental curves, as the logarith- mic spiral, are those whose equation is tran- scendental, i. e., expresses a relation between transcendental quantities. TRANSFUSION OF BLOOD, the operation of introducing into the vascular system of one animal blood taken from the vessels of another. This operation was suggested and described by Libavius early in the 17th century, but it was first successfully practised by Richard Lower in England in 1665. Some years previously it had been ascertained by Robert Boyle that various medicinal substances might be injected directly into the blood vessels of the living dog, with the result of producing their specific effect upon the animal system, as if they had been introduced by the stomach. Lower's experi- ments were also performed upon the dog, by connecting, by means of a tube, the carotid artery of one animal with the jugular vein of another, the vein of the second dog being allowed to remain open above the point of connection. Thus the blood lost by the second dog was supplied by that coming from the carotid artery of the first. The consequence was that the animal into whose vessels the blood was introduced in this way by transfu- sion remained uninjured, while the other died of exhaustion from haemorrhage. These ex- periments encouraged the idea of performing a similar operation upon the human subject. This was first done in France in 1666 by Denys and Emmerets. They believed that the opera- tion might result in the cure of chronic diseases by introducing into the veins of the patient healthy blood from a foreign source ; and ac- cordingly they transfused the blood of a sheep for this purpose into a man. The first re- sults were said to have been so favorable as to excite the most extravagant anticipations, and to create great enthusiasm in the minds of the medical profession in favor of the opera- tion. But these promises were not fulfilled, and as several instances occurred soon after- ward where the operation was followed by bad consequences, there was a corresponding re- action against it, and in 1668 the parliament of Paris forbade its repetition except by special consent of the faculty. In 1818 the operation of transfusion was again taken up by Dr. Blun- dell of London, who carefully experimented upon it as applied to its original and legitimate object, namely, the restoration of life after ex- hausting haemorrhage. He performed 33 ex- periments upon dogs, and established by them the following facts: 1, that dogs, when ex- hausted by haemorrhage, may be resuscitated, even after momentary stoppage of the respira- tion, by injecting the blood of other dogs ; 2, that human blood injected into a dog, in suffi- cient quantity to supply the loss caused by abundant haemorrhage, produces a temporary reanimation, but does not save life, as the dog dies some hours afterward ; 3, that the trans- fusion of blood, whether arterial or venous, wifl be successful if the two animals belong to the same species; 4, that the blood used in transfusion need not be conveyed directly from the vascular system of one animal to that of the other, but may be received into a cup and passed through a syringe, without being thereby rendered unfit for the purposes of life. The operation was thus placed upon its proper foot- ing, and one of the important conditions for its success brought into notice ; namely, that the hiood used for transfusion should belong to an animal of the same or at least a kindred species. This explained in great measure the