If we compare the amount of the veins with those of the absorbents, it is difficult undoubtedly after what has been said, to form any precise idea of it; but we can make approximations. Now the absorbents do not appear hardly inferior to the veins; as to the branches, for example, the whole of the lymphatics of the lower limbs, placed by the side of the capacity of the venous trunks, does not appear much inferior to it. So in all the other parts, the veins being larger, but the absorbents more numerous, the disproportion is not very great. From this it seems as if there would be but little difference between the trunks that terminate the veins and those that are the terminations of the exhalant system; however this difference is enormous, as we shall see. _Anastomoses of the Absorbents, in their course._ In the extremities, on the exterior of the trunk and the head, in the intermuscular spaces, &c. the anastomoses are very evident. We see branches of communication going from one absorbent to another; so that we might often say that these vessels are bifurcated. But this appearance is most usually deceptive; for each branch of the bifurcation is almost always as large as the trunk. Under the serous surfaces, as on the convex face of the liver, the lungs, the spleen, &c. the anastomoses are infinitely more numerous; it is a kind of net-work in the plates of authors; for I confess that I have never injected this portion of the absorbent system. The anastomoses of the absorbents are made, 1st. from one vessel to another that is contiguous to it; 2d. from the sub-cutaneous divisions to the intermuscular in the extremities, and in the organs, from the sub-serous divisions to those that occupy the interior of these organs. 3d. They take place between the absorbents of the superior regions and those of the inferior; 4th. between those that go to the thoracic duct and those that go to the great lymphatic vessel of the right side, &c. By these anastomoses we understand how a tube with mercury, being placed in one absorbent, many others around it are filled. They are so much the more necessary, in the system of which we are treating, as the lymph is subject, like the black blood, to an infinite variety of causes of delay in its course, from the want of an agent of impulse at the origin of the absorbents.