Albuminous Exudation occurs united to a proportion of fibrin as a fibrino-albuminous; or as a mere albuminous; or again, mingled with a certain proportion of serum, as a sero-albuminous exudate.

Albuminous exudates are marked by their fluidity, by their tenacious, ropy consistence, often by their abundance. They are colorless and resemble a thick synovia; or milk-white and opaque; or again blended with croupous fibrin and of a yellowish-white. Their turbidness, and also their thick porridge-like nature, are due to their quota of form-elements (elementary granules, nuclei, cells), to their proportion of fat, and to fatty conversion (granule-cells); or again, they are due to an act of coagulation, the albumen assuming, by virtue of a chemical conversion of the entire exudate, the coagulate form. Coagula of this kind are for the most part soft, flocculent, forming, upon serous membranes, velvety deposits, - not unfrequently as the inner coating to a periphe-rous fibrinous coagulation.

The form-elements, present in various amount in the albuminous exudate, are identical with those found in the fibrinous exudate, nucleus and cell exhibiting themselves in multiform variety, ending with the perfect pus-cell.

It is very rare for albuminous exudates to assume at once - that is, immediately on becoming effused, the solid form.

The changes which albuminous exudates undergo, vary with the character of the albumen. In the one case, they enter into a progressive transformation of texture, which in fluid albumen obeys - in solidified albumen evades - the laws of the cell theory, thus determining hypertrophy of the areolar tissue, and induration and extinction of the parenchyma, for example, in the lungs. In dyscrasial constitution of the albumen, on the other hand, they have a decided tendency to liquefaction, to fatty conversion, whereby they become either fitted for resorption, or endowed with a corrosive power.

Their appearance is for the most part connected with a crasis, involving either a simple predominance of albumen (deficiency of fibrin) in the blood, or concurrently a dyscrasial condition of the former. To the first description belongs, for instance, the venous diathesis (Venositat), the concomitant of heart disease, of infancy, and of extreme age, of atrophy, of defibrination. The products are represented by colorless, adhesive, pasty exudates, poor in form-elements, and, owing to the often low intensity of the stasis, largely diluted with serum; - sero-albuminous. To the second description belong the erases which attach to cutaneous affections, to typhus and the like, with their dull whitish effusion; and, again, the anomalous quality of albumen pertaining to the fibrino-croup-ous crasis, to pyaemia and the like, with their pus-like effusion. The stases are often of the asthenic or hypostatic kind, and run a protracted course.