Toward the close of the attack the congested mucous membrane of the bronchi begins to secrete, and there is more or less cough. The matter expectorated consists at first of little balls of tough, semi-transparent mucus not much larger than a pea. It is exceedingly tenacious, and is raised with great difficulty. Examined under the microscope, the sputum is found to consist "of a great number of corpuscles, some of which are polyhedral in form with rounded angles; they are pale, homogeneous, and slightly granular. At first sight they resemble pus-corpuscles, but they are much larger, less circular in form, and have no nucleus. In addition to these corpuscles there are others which are oval, elongated, fusiform, and sometimes linear in shape, but all of them appear to be of the same nature and possess the same refracting power as the corpuscles first mentioned. They are all of them agglomerated in a sort of viscous matter."[4] The expectoration often contains blood, and in some rare instances profuse hemorrhages have been known to occur. Sometimes the matter has particles of soot and coal-dust intermingled with it, the so-called carbonaceous sputum (Sée). In addition to the cells above described, the sputa contains small yellowish-green masses or threads in which are imbedded the peculiar octahedral crystals which Leyden has ingeniously connected with the etiology of asthma, and to which we shall again have occasion to refer.[5] Ungar has recently also discovered crystals of oxalate of lime in the sputa. [Footnote 4: Germain Sée, _Nouveau Dictionnaire de Médecine et de Chirurgie_, pp. 612, 613; also, Salter, _Asthma, its Pathology and Treatment_, Am. ed., p. 944.] [Footnote 5: Riegel, in _Ziemssen's Handbuch d. Pathologie u. Therapie_, vol. iv. 2, pp. 268, 285.] Laryngoscopic examination reveals more or less congestion of the air-passages. "In ordinary respiration the glottis is widely open during inspiration, and at each expiration the arytenoid cartilages approach each other so as to narrow the glottis; but in the labored respiration of asthma the glottis is fixed in the condition of expiration; that is, the glottis is narrowed, and the air enters and is expired through the same narrow space."[6] [Footnote 6: Steavenson, _Spasmodic Asthma_, p. 23.]