Page:The third Huxley lecture.pdf/23

19 living vessel was most striking; the red corpuscles presenting a degree of adhesiveness such as I had never before seen equalled, whether outside the body or within the vessels. When forced to separate from each other by pressure made upon the cover-glass, they became drawn out like threads of a viscid liquid before becoming completely detached. The animal had been suffering from a bad compound fracture in one of the wings. Whether the great adhesiveness of the red discs of the shed blood was due- to inflammation caused by the injury, or whether such a condition is normal to the bat, as it is to the horse and the ass, I do not know.

By such facts it seemed to be established that the stasis of the blood in an irritated area, that is to say, the accumulation of the blood-corpuscles, both red and white, in the vessels of that area, is due to a tendency on their part to adhere to each other and to the walls of the vessels; that they do this by virtue of an adhesiveness or viscidity which they do not manifest at all within the vessels of a perfectly healthy part, and which, while varying in degree with the severity of the irritation, never seems to exceed that which is observed in blood outside the body.

What was it that induced the blood-corpuscles to assume this adhesiveness under irritation? It was clearly not the result of direct action of the irritant upon them. When the inflammatory congestion, as