t; and hence vegetable food, which
is itself acescent, will agree with their stomachs longer than animal food,
which requires more of the gastric acid for its digestion.

In this disease the skin is dry from the increased absorption of the
cutaneous lymphatics, the fat is absorbed from the increased absorption of
the cellular lymphatics, the mucus of the lungs is too viscid to be easily
spit up by the increased absorption of the thinner parts of it, the
membrana sneideriana becomes dry, covered with hardened mucus, and at
length becomes inflamed and full of aphthae, and either these sloughs, or
pulmonary ulcers, terminate the scene.

II. The immediate cause of dropsy is the paralysis of some other branches
of the absorbent system, which are called lymphatics, and which open into
the larger cavities of the body, or into the cells of the cellular
membrane; whence those cavities or cells become distended with the fluid,
which is hourly secreted into them for the purpose of lubricating their
surfaces. As is more fully explained in No. 5. of the next Section.

As those lymphatic vessels consist generally of a long neck or mouth, which
drinks up its appropriated fluid, and of a conglobate gland, in which this
fluid undergoes some change, it happens, that sometimes the mouth of the
lymphatic, and sometimes the belly or glandular part of it, becomes totally
or partially paralytic. In the former case, where the mouths of the
cutaneous lymphatics become torpid or quiescent, the fluid secreted on the
skin ceases to be absorbed, and erodes the skin by its saline acrimony, and
produces eruptions termed herpes, the discharge from which is as salt, as
the tears, which are secreted too fast to be reabsorbed, as in grief, or
when the puncta lacrymalia are obstructed, and which running down the cheek
redden and inflame the skin.

When the mouths of the lymphatics, which open on the mucous membrane of the
nostrils, become torpid, as on walking into the air in a frosty morning;
the mucus, which continues to be secreted, has not its aqueous and saline
part reabsorbed, which running over the upper lip inflames it, and has a
salt taste, if it falls on the tongue.

When the belly, or glandular part of these lymphatics, becomes torpid, the
fluid absorbed by its mouth stagnates, and forms a tumour in the gland.
This disease is called the scrophula. If these glands suppurate externally,
they gradually heal, as those of the neck; if they suppur