The difference of textures not only modifies the symptoms, but affects the duration of them also. Nothing in medicine is more vague, in this point of view, than the terms acute and chronic, in relation to inflammations of the different textures. Most commonly they run their course rapidly in the dermoid, cellular, serous, mucous textures, &c.; on the other hand, they are slow in the bones, the cartilages, and the fibro-cartilages. If we apply this distinction to the same texture, it is very well; thus there are catarrhs, serous and cutaneous inflammations, &c. that are acute and chronic. But if we generalize it, it cannot be understood. A catarrh would be chronic if it lasted two months; but this is the common term of an acute inflammation of the bones; a chronic one continues for a whole year or more. Cutaneous, mucous wounds, &c. last only five or six days if they heal by the first intention; while it requires thirty or forty for a bone, a cartilage, &c. to be cicatrized by the juxta-position of its different parts. A disease cannot be classed, then, by its duration, as an acute or chronic one, except in relation to the same system; when we describe it then in a general way, this distinction becomes void. Physicians consider abstractedly almost all diseases. When they speak of inflammation they describe the redness, swelling, throbbing and pain, as general attributes, always uniform. If of suppuration, they take for a general standard that of the cellular texture, in phlegmon, without thinking that it is only one of the modifications of suppuration and its product. The same may be said of gangrene, scirrhus, &c. Nothing is more vague and uncertain than the general ideas that are given concerning a disease; they scarcely agree in one or two of the textures. It is not only the history of diseases that the anatomy of systems will elucidate; it will change in part the method of treating morbid anatomy. Morgagni, to whom we owe so much in this respect, and many others, to whom the art is indebted, have adopted the general arrangement used in descriptions. They have examined the diseases of the head, the chest, the abdomen, and the extremities. In following this method, they can only form to themselves a general idea of the alterations common to all the textures. The ideas are necessarily too much contracted, when there is presented only an insulated part of a system, which is composed of a great many others. If, besides this, you obtain a general knowledge of the affections of each system, you must bear in mind, with regard to each, the general ideas concerning the affections of the parts they compose. It appears to me to be infinitely more simple to consider at first all the affections common to each system, and then to observe what every organ has peculiar to itself in the part that it occupies.