Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900Various
Science
Appletons' Popular Science Monthly, January 1900: Vol. 56, November, 1899 to April, 1900
Various
Science -- Periodicals; Technology -- Periodicals
All the other characteristics of the white globules flow from these
two of mobility and phagocytism, the significance of which has been
set in a clear light by M. Metchnikoff. These characteristics are the
attributes of the most primitive types of animal life. They appertain
to cells not yet differentiated, to the unicellular organisms which
occupy the first stages of life. They translate the vital energy of
elements still independent and isolated, without definite place in
the social organization and as yet without special high function,
but for that very reason better adapted to the needs of the simplest
animality. Their voracity is useful for the preservation of the social
organism. By eliminating old, exhausted, diseased cells they rejuvenate
the structure and prepare the way for new generations. And when the
fecundity of these is exhausted the leucocytes come in to occupy the
vacated situations, and conduct the organism thus patched up through a
senile degeneracy to natural death.
The leucocytes, white globules, or phagocytes, by virtue of their
mobility, are found everywhere--in the blood, in all the organs,
and in all parts of the body--but are perhaps most abundant in the
blood. The study of them proceeds slowly, and we are still engaged in
distinguishing the varieties among them. The most abundant and best
known of them--those which answer most closely the description we have
given--are those called the polynuclear, neutrophilous leucocytes. They
are colored with neutral hues, and have a nucleus like a rolled-up
scroll in structure. Other varieties--the eosinophiles, lymphocytes,
etc.--are less mobile and have still less marked phagocytic properties.
The roll-call of the phagocytic army would be a long task. The
phagocytes are numerous in the sanguineous fluid, but are still six
hundred and fifty times less so than the red corpuscles. They are
almost as numerous in the lymph and the conjunctival tissue, where,
besides occurring in their normal condition, they sport into a variety
which appears to have abandoned its migratory habit, for a time at
least, and into a giant variety one hundred times larger than the
ordinary leucocytes, which M. Ranvier calls clasmatocytes. They are
further found in such tissues as the skin and the mucous membrane,
where, notwithstanding the cells are so crowded, they make their way
into the intestine, and, by a sort of diapedesis (passage through the
pores or interstices) called the phenomenon of Stoehr, toward all the
free surfaces, whither exterior soluble substances invite them. As they
go they destroy the microbes which, advancing in an inverse direction,
would invade the organism and provoke an infection of intestinal origin.
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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