Primitive Anomalies Of Blastema may be occasioned in a twofold manner:

(a.) They may be rooted in a general dyscrasy of the sanguineous mass. The effusion of blastema coincides with manifest anomaly of general nutrition. The blastema bears the impress of dyscrasial adulteration. This is particularly the case with blastemata deposited in mass as inflammatory products. Indeed, the copious production of blastema in reduced, enfeebled subjects, admits of no other conclusion than that of a dyscrasial condition as the source of such effusion; the specific character of the latter being simultaneously manifested by its obvious preference for particular organs.

(b.) Again, the said primitive anomalies may, where the general crasis is untainted, be based in an altered admixture of the plasma (the blood) owing to local changes of innervation; or else in an anomalous act of nutrition, for example, inflammation.

In the former case, the blastema is a symptomatic manifestation of a constitutional disease, and is of general - in the latter case it is of mere local - import. The same blastema, pus, cancer-blastema, for instance, may, in one case, imply general, in another, local disease.

A new growth would, however, be equally of local significance if it resulted from a blastema of originally normal character through an anomalous determining influence on the part of the nerves or textures, or of an anomalous interchange of matter (resorption, etc).

Amongst the many causal relations, the mode of operation of which is unknown, mechanical influences are by no means the least frequent originators of anomalous blastemata through local changes of innervation and of textural influence.

We shall now leave this discussion, and proceed to an inquiry concerning the metamorphoses of blastema. Amongst these, the first rank is taken up with the development of blastema into textures. Here solid blastemata, as the groundwork of pathological new growths, present so great a difference from fluid, that the two must, as far as possible, be separately considered.

The latter are all developed according to the laws of the cell theory, whilst the former disclose, besides a variety of granule and of fibro-nucleus formations, a direct, and, for the most part, preter-physiological development, in various ways, to higher elements in the shape of fibre.

Blastemata of this description are represented by coagulated fibrin and coagulated albumen. In the identity, however, of the process of development in both, fibrin is pre-eminently adapted for experimental study, owing to the greater frequency of its occurrence, especially in an aggregate and bulky form. Under certain conditions, its coagulation alone suffices to constitute textural formation. We shall, therefore, do well to preface an inquiry into the nature of solid blastemata by the study of coagulate fibrin in its relation to the doctrine of exudation and of blood disease.