The products of inflammation are retained bodily, or after imperfect resorption, partially, in their original, or it may be in an altered shape and constitution. Conformably with what has been stated, the exudates continue -

1. In their original crude state, as entirely amorphous masses, or more commonly in a condition bordering upon this, of incipient textural development, in the shape of molecular granules, of nucleus and cell-formation, or in the case of consolidated blastemata, in the laminated and fibrous structure engendered by the coagulative process itself.

2. Or they break up sooner or later, and abide in a state of final cretaceous or fatty conversion.

3. Solid exudates waste away, and condense and shrivel into a horny substance.

4. They become organized, attaining thus to various grades of development. In fluid exudates this development follows the laws of the cell theory, whilst, in the organizable, solid, fibrin-exudates it consists in immediate fibrillation through dissilience.

The exudates enter, bodily, into a uniform textural change. This change may, however, conformably with the frequent primitive impurity of blastemata, be in many cases unequable. One portion of the exudate may attain a higher gradation and represent permanent textures, whilst another may be arrested at an embryonic stage, and there liquefy and become reabsorbed, or, like pus and ichor, qualify itself essentially for excretion.

A textural conversion of exudates may be of a nature very similar to, if not identical with, the normal structure, in its anatomical, chemical, and functional relations. Or, again, it may involve one or more heterologous formations, pus and cancer, for instance.

It is more particularly areolar tissue, and the various fibroid textures tending to the final composition of the latter; cartilage in the process of ossification; and bone with its penetrating vessels, that are here referred to as organized products of inflammation.

These often serve to compensate for lost parts, as also for the filling up of vacant spaces wrought by the retraction of normal textures after injuries, regeneration in muscles for instance.

The regeneration is complete; or it is imperfect, being accomplished by means of a texture not homologous with the lost one, - as in the cicatrix. This, again, may be permanent, or it may be provisional only, and about to disappear after becoming endowed with textural elements identical with the normal ones, - the nerve-cicatrix, for example.

Where permanent exudates do not serve for compensation, they occasion an increase of mass in the diseased organ. They are then -

(a.) Uniformly interposed between the elements of the normal texture. This determines an inflammatory hypertrophy, which, perhaps, occurs in a genuine form only in areolar tissue and in bone.

(b.) Or they form in a larger circumscribed mass, distinct from the normal texture, - a tumor. These local collections of cicatrix texture occur in muscle (the heart) and in all parenchymata. Upon serous membranes, they constitute the various organized pseudo-membranes and membranaceous adhesions. We have here further to remark:

1. In bulky, and particularly in solid, wasting exudates, or such as are in progress of transformation into dense, shrivelling (fibroid) structures, any textural elements which they have embraced become atrophied by pressure and tension, hindrance to their nutrition, and the suppression of their function. Even contiguous textures waste away, owing to arrested or impaired function - for instance, the muscular apparatus of respiration over thick, resistent, shrivelling, pleuritic effusion.

2. In hollow organs the abiding of exudates not rarely occasions a hypertrophic development to cystiform dilatations, with transformation of the texture of their walls and contents. As examples, we may refer to the degradation of glandular acini, and of the follicles into cysts. (See Cyst).

3. Solid exudates determine, through increased consistency and density of the textures previously inflamed, the issue of the inflammation in so termed induration. On the other hand, the abiding of soft liquid exudates results in relaxation, softening, lacerability of the textures.

4. Exudates are often found to linger under several combined forms, with which, moreover, both resorption and suppuration may have concurred.