We know that in those who are drowned, a great quantity of gas disengaged from different organs, from those especially that contain much blood, as the muscles, the glands, &c. fills the cellular texture, renders it emphysematous and makes the body float. This does not so often take place in the open air, where putrefaction is sudden and where there is a discolouration and disorganization of parts. The tendons, the aponeuroses, the cartilages, the bones, &c. have appeared to me in animals drowned for the purpose, not to assist in the production of this gas. The cellular texture itself has less part in it, I think, than the organs before pointed out. It would be easy to know the kind of gas that each organized system furnishes, by macerating these systems separately in closed vessels, so arranged that their aeriform products might be collected. If each has a peculiar mode of putrefaction and gangrene, &c. if in this state their appearance is different, it is presumable that the products that escape from them are also different. In dead bodies that are buried, and beyond the reach of the air, the emphysematous swelling often takes place, and it is sometimes so powerful, as I have observed in a church-yard, that it will raise the lid of the coffin, though it may be covered with half a foot of earth, which raises it then above the level of the earth that covers the other coffins. II. _Parts common to the organization of the cellular system. Blood vessels._ We must not judge of the vessels of the cellular texture by injections. When they are fine and have succeeded well, a thousand different threads interlaced in every way, destroy its whitish colour and change it into a vascular net-work. The appearance of a body thus injected is deceptive; it arises from this, that the exhalants have admitted a fluid forced through the arteries, whilst their own sensibility would repulse the blood in an ordinary state. In dissecting the cellular texture upon a living animal, it is seen to be white as in the dead body, and that great trunks that do not belong to it, send off in passing through it different branches and ramifications that are evidently lost in it. In raising the skin from the subjacent organs, the sub-cutaneous texture is distended, and we may clearly distinguish in it different little branches that end there; this is remarkable in dogs. By first making the cellular texture emphysematous, the experiment succeeds better. We see, also, very well in this way, that the blood varies in the vessels; often after being exposed sometime to the air, there appears double the number of them there was when it was laid bare. There are always remarkable variations, if the place that is denuded is examined even for a short time; it is the blood retained in the exhalants, and it seems thus to increase the number of little arteries. _Exhalants._