Page:The third Huxley lecture.pdf/59

55 aroused my interest in my student days in a ease of pyæmia, made such a view to me incredible, and I determined to ascertain, if possible, the real state of things by experiment. I introduced into a vein of a living horse a short glass tube open at both ends, containing a piece of silver wire in which was mounted a little hit of calico, which I thought likely to give rise slowly to putrefactive change; shutting off the portion of vein concerned from the general circulation by means of ligatures. After the lapse of some days I removed the venous compartment and found that the blood in it had undergone very remarkable changes. The limits of this lecture (which have been already too widely extended) make it impossible for me to enter into details, as I had hoped to have done, regarding the researches of which this was the commencement. I must content myself with stating the conclusion to which I was led at the time I am speaking of, and which was confirmed by later investigation, viz., that the introduction of septic material into a vein may give rise to the rapid development of large nucleated cells which, growing at the expense of the original constituents of the coagulum, convert it entirely into a thick yellow liquid. The pus so formed contains corpuscles which, like those which I sketched in the early case at University College, are not pus corpuscles in the ordinary sense or leucocytes, hut the variouslysized, more or less granular nuclei of the large cells, the pellucid bodies of which constitute the so-called liquor puris. Into the question of the origin of these