As to the anatomical state of the absorbents in the fœtus and childhood, we can know but little; I do not know that any author has injected them comparatively in this age and in the adult. I have but one fact upon this point, it is that the lacteals, examined in an experiment upon two young dogs, who had only left off sucking eight days, appeared to me larger in proportion than at a more advanced age. I will make one remark that has often struck me; it is that the size of the animal has much less influence than would be thought upon the diameter of these vessels. For example, an adult dog, twice as large as another, has not by a great deal, vessels of double size. Accident led me to examine them the same day, three years since, upon two large grey-hounds, that were among the dogs brought to me, and upon one of those vulgarly called cur dogs; they were nearly equal in all three; this struck me. We know but little of the different revolutions that absorption undergoes in the ages that succeed infancy. Only there is no doubt that puberty is the limit of this kind of predominance which the lymphatic glands enjoyed in the economy. The age of their diseases is then passed; often even these diseases, heretofore beyond the reach of art, are spontaneously cured. The predominance of the genital organs which succeeds to this and some others, those of the sensitive-organs, &c. seems to destroy the germ which this first supported. Soemmering has described in a particular work the part that the absorbents perform in the different diseases of the adult and the other ages. This part has appeared to me to be often very difficult to be known, notwithstanding what he has said of it. I refer however to his work on this point. In old age, nutritive absorption continues very active; for it is that which decomposes the body, which takes from it the substances that nourish it, and which consequently withers and dries the organs. The external absorptions, on the contrary, are feeble; the skin takes with great difficulty the different contagions, as I shall say in treating of this organ; the mucous surfaces absorb slowly; but little chyle passes into the blood in proportion to what enters it in the adult. The two absorptions, the nutritive and the external, are exactly reversed at the two extreme ages of life; the second is superior to the first in infancy, the first predominates in old age. As to the internal absorptions, as those of synovia, of the serous surfaces, of the cellular texture, &c. I should think that they predominated in old age, and that to this was to be attributed the numerous serous effusions which happen at that age, and which we observe in dead bodies. We have not however upon this point so good data as upon the other two. V. _Preternatural Absorption._