The cellular texture forms besides around the glands a thick membrane which more immediately envelops them, and which deprived of fat and serum, exhibits the nature of the cellular covering of the absorbents. It is this last membrane which, in the ordinary state, gives to the glands an appearance in general smooth and polished; for mercurial injections develop in them some roughness, owing to the prominence of the vessels that run through them in the interior. Some slight depressions are also visible on their surface; they are to these glands, what the furrows on their concave face, are to the liver, the spleen and the lungs; it is through them that the vessels enter. We might think that the arteries were very numerous in the lymphatic glands, if we judged from injections which colour the whole of them, if they are fine and adroitly used; but little reliance should be placed upon this. Simple inspection, in a living animal, which is infinitely more certain, does not discover much blood in these glands. In the fœtus and in childhood, the quantity of this fluid is much more considerable; hence in part the redness that characterizes these organs at this period of life. We are ignorant whether nerves exist in them, and whether any of the numerous branches that the ganglions send in their neighbourhood, especially in the mesentery, are introduced into their texture; I have never traced any of them there. _Peculiar Texture._ The peculiar substance of the lymphatic glands exhibits a pulp very analogous to that of the nervous ganglions. No fibre can be distinguished in them. Soft in the fœtus, withered in the few glands that remain in old age, this substance, is particularly altered, as I shall say, by scrophulous diseases, and by the influence of the affections of the neighbouring organs.