wiped dry, it is soon after covered with new serum, which the exhalants furnish. _Absorbents._ From the texture of the serous membranes, it is evident that the lymphatic system enters essentially into their formation, and that they are probably only a net-work of exhalants and absorbents; for we have seen that the cellular organ is an assemblage of them. But this assertion which analogy dictates is also supported by direct proofs. 1st. The fluid of the dropsies of the different cavities varies in density and colour; now Mascagni has always observed that the lymphatics in their neighbourhood contained a fluid exactly analogous. 2d. The same author has found in two dead bodies, with a sanguineous effusion in the thorax, the absorbents of the lungs loaded with blood. 3d. In a man who had become emphysematous after having been poisoned, these vessels were distended with air. 4th. Coloured fluids injected into the abdomen or thorax are soon after found, it is said, in the neighbouring lymphatics, with the same colour. I have often repeated this experiment; the injected fluid has been soon absorbed, but not the matter which coloured it; so that this matter, more condensed after absorption, tinged the serous surface, the lymphatics being as transparent as usual. It is necessary in general to choose the abdomen for these experiments, because the absorbents being much exposed on the liver, can be more easily examined there. This absorbent faculty is preserved some time after death; but care should be taken, in order to obtain then the effect more certainly, to keep the animal, if a warm blooded one, in a bath of nearly its own temperature; I have had frequent opportunities of being convinced of this truth, and of observing with Cruickshank, that what Mascagni has said upon the absorption of dead human bodies, fifteen, thirty, forty-eight hours even after death, is at least very much exaggerated. 5th. The following experiment I make every year to demonstrate the absorbents; I macerate for five or six hours the heart of an ox in water; at the end of this time, the serous membrane of this organ, which hardly allowed these vessels to be perceived, appears to be covered with them. 6th. When the serous membranes are inflamed, the subjacent lymphatics are distended, like them, by the red globules of blood, &c. &c.