Looking at the often slight intensity of the inflammatory symptons, the analogy between a granulating wound (abscess) and a secreting organ, - between pus and a secretion prepared by those elementary bodies, cells, appears so great, and the current comparison with a mucous membrane and its product so apt, as forcibly to recur to us, even at the present day. Thus, no sooner have the growths which presided over the secretion - in other words, the granulations - become exalted into textures, than the secretion itself fails.

Referring certain particulars connected with the anatomical doctrine of exudates to the head of crasis, we have still to consider, as kindred with ichorous exudates, diffluent exudates, and with them hemorrhagic effusion.

(A.) Solvent Exudates

Akin to ichorous exudates, they are marked by their destructiveness to subjacent textures, by the obviously solvent character of their effects, and by the absence of any outward tokens to denote their mischievous character.

These are products which, owing to the corrosion of textures accompanying the very act of their exudation, are rarely to be met with in their simplicity, products which display immense variety in their physical properties. As the extreme limits of a long series, we find, on the one side, a coagulable, fibrinous exudate which has the effect of slightly corroding the subjacent membranous substance. On the other side we have a thin exudate, variously discolored, which reduces the textures, extensively, to a dingy brown, chocolate-colored, inky (hemorrhagic), or greenish, pulpy, tinderlike, fetid, slough. This last-mentioned exudate represents the processes which Boer described in the uterus as putrescence, a term quite deserving of application to the same condition in other parts. Midway between these two extremes, we encounter the most remarkable - however seemingly insignificant - thin, serous, sero-albuminous, tenacious, paste-like, sero-purulent, almost colorless, or again yellowish, reddish-yellow, exudates, in contact with which the textures are resolved according to their degree of injection, into a pale, or into a more or less deeply-reddened pulp.

Their seat, always diffuse, is most particularly the mucous membrane of the intestinal tract, and most commonly of the colon, not rarely of their follicles (in the shape of diarrhoea or dysentery), and, lastly, of the uterus, as puerperal affections following childbirth. Of the principle upon which this liquefiant destruction of the tissues depends, nothing is known beyond its frequent acid reaction, nor has any crasis corresponding to it been recognized.