Cornification is observed especially in the vegetations about the heart's valves, and in the layers accumulated within arteries. The growth becomes dry, denser, of horn-like toughness, and of dull transparency.

Vascularized fibroid growths occasionally take on inflammation, for the most part from the surrounding tissues, suppurate, and perish layer by layer. Nor is it rare for them to become loosened and cast away through the suppuration of adjoining textures.

Gluten yielding fibroid tumor, also denominated fibrous tumor, formerly designated as sarcoma, steatoma, or even as scirrhus.

They are distinguished from other fibroid tumors by their independence and circumscription, as being sheathed in a layer of vascular and areolar tissue, and thus, as it were, impacted in the texture of organs, from whence they may be fairly peeled out. They represent more or less perfectly spherical, for the most part tough, fibro-cartilage-like, resisting, distinctly fibrous, according to their degree of vascularity, whitish or reddish-white, new growths. In size they vary from that of a tumor just cognizable, up to, and beyond that of a man's head. They often coexist numerously in the same organ.

They probably occur in every organ, although they are, without doubt, frequently confounded, more especially in glands, with fibrous sarcoma, and with fibro-carcinoma. They are frequent in the submucous areolar tissue layers, more particularly in the intestine, stomach, and oesophagus, now and then in the larynx, again, in the subcutaneous areolar tissue, and very commonly in the uterus and its appendages, where their development is in every way very strongly marked. Their texture is usually made up of areolar-tissue fibre, or of the elements described at a, b, and c. The uterus fibroids, in particular, very often repeat the fibre of organic-muscle tissue.

With respect to the arrangement of the constituting fibres, fibre-layers and fasciculi, much variety is manifested, and this, again, is preeminently marked in the uterus fibroid. Thus:

(a.) The fibroid tumor, with concentrical lamination of the fibre-layers, is commonly quite spherical, very dense and tough, poor in bloodvessels, white, never attaining the magnitude of the species that follow.

(b.) Fibroid, with manifold decussation of the fibres. The fibration frequently springs from distinct centres marked by their density and whiteness. These tumors grow to a considerable magnitude, and have an irregular flattened tuberosity of surface.

The following is a variety of this fibroid:

The tumor consists of an aggregation of dense fibroid tubercula or centres, about the size of peas or beans, united by means of a lax vascular texture. These tumors have an uneven undulating surface, and attain to a very considerable bulk. The loose interstitial texture sometimes becomes the seat of a serous infiltration, which, under dragging and eventual laceration of the said texture, may become exalted into dropsy within the tumor. The fibroid contains within its interior a cavity replete with serous fluid, fluctuates, and may thus present the appearances of a cyst - in the uterus, more particularly that of a hydro-metra.

All these fibroids ossify.

(c.) There is one other variety of fibre-tumor, which, so far as its elements are concerned, ranks with the foregoing growths. In other respects, however, it differs from them, and offers a transition form to fibro-sarcoma.

The characteristic of this last form of fibrous tumors is that, varying in circumference, they are so rooted in the implicated organs as not to be removable from, without injury to, the latter; that they become lobulated in their growth, and yield little gluten; whilst, on the other hand, they contain albumen, and in their fibrillation are, at least in part, developed out of cells. Not rarely we find in them excavations lined with a smooth membrane, and filled with a sero-albuminous fluid, alveoli, cysts. They are further marked by considerable vascularity.

Like other kindred forms referable to the class of fibro-sarcoma, they are often rooted in the submucous, areolar, and muscular textures, in areolar tissue, in the periosteum subjacent to mucous membranes, and in the inner layers of the substance of the womb. Here, under the designation of fibrous, sarcomatous flesh-polypi, they grow into the muco-membranous cavities, with predominant longitudinal direction of their fibres, pushing forward the mucous membranes themselves in their advance, and representing cylindrical, spindle-like, pear-shaped, bulbous tumors, lobulated at their free extremity, and traversed, more especially in the uterus, by capacious bloodvessels (veins).

As so-called polypi, they are to be carefully distinguished from mucous, cellular, or vesicular polypi.

They do not ossify.