From what has been said, it is evident that the cartilaginous life can have but little activity, that all the morbid phenomena must be characterized in these organs by a peculiar slowness, and that inflammation, for example, must always have in the cartilages, as in the bones, a chronic progress; this is rendered very clear by the following experiment. Lay bare a cartilage, divide it, and afterwards bring it in contact with a portion of a muscle, the skin, &c. also divided at their surface; the reunion does not take place, or at least not until a very long time. Why? because the life of the muscle or the skin being much more active than that of the cartilages, the inflammation of the first organs will be much more rapid than that of the second, and consequently the first inflammatory period of one will correspond to the last of the others. Now the reunion is so much the easier as the inflammatory periods correspond the more exactly in the two divided parts that are in contact. Hence why two parts of the same organ unite much more easily than two surfaces belonging to different organs. Hence why the greater the analogy in the lives of the two organs, the greater the facility with which they unite; why the difficulties increase as the differences of life become greater. Two osseous surfaces in contact require thirty or forty days to unite; the two edges of a cutaneous wound unite in two or three days. If you attempt to render continuous two organs thus unlike in their mode of cicatrization, by putting them in contact, you will succeed but slowly. Cover with skin the osseous extremity of an amputated stump; this will be in a state of suppuration, before the bone has hardly begun to soften; thus good practitioners have abandoned these pretended unions by the first intention, so much boasted of, after amputation by the flap operation. These unions would no doubt take place, if the life of the organs which enter into the composition of the flap was the same. But with the diversity of these muscular, osseous, tendinous, cellular, nervous organs, &c. it requires a long time for all their lives to be placed as it were in equilibrium, and for these organs to agglutinate at their divided extremities. I have already observed that the division of inflammations into acute and chronic gives physicians an inexact idea; for the duration of the inflammatory phenomena in the organs is wholly relative to their degree of life. An inflammation of the cellular texture and of the skin is acute, when it lasts but a few days; it is chronic when it continues forty or fifty days; in a cartilage, this last period may be that of an acute inflammation, whilst a duration of many months is necessary to make it chronic, as the diseases of the joints exhibit frequent examples.