In the croupous crases hitherto described hyperinosis commonly prevails; in the crasis we are now entering upon, the amount of fibrin in the blood is for the most part scanty. By so much the more significant must be the anomaly in the quality of the fibrin and in the general crasis, and we shall presently see this to be really the case, if we extend the idea of this crasis in a natural order beyond that constitution of the blood proper to ordinary aphthae as affecting the mucous membrane of the mouth.

The exudates appertaining to the croupous crases before described occasion destruction of the textures only after long-continued contact with them, and in their secondary phase of disintegration. In the aphthous exudates this effect is produced at once, and as it would seem during the process of exudation itself.

The exudates are yellow, greenish-yellow, dingy gray, opaque, tough products, which, upon superficial expansions, coagulate in a pseudo-membranous form, and, together with the textures, rapidly break up. They are very often remarkable for the exuberant epiphyte-formations [thread-funguses] which take root in them. The disintegration manifests itself in various forms, doubtless connected most intimately with the grade and with the modification of the crasis, from simple corrosion with secondary reactive inflammation in the vicinity [aphthae], down to fusion to a variously discolored, fetid, ichorous pulp, or to a tough or a friable slough, that tears like soft agaric.

With this the crasis has attained the phase of a putrid decomposition, a sepsis, a necrosis of the fibrin and of the general circulating fluid. The blood is discolored and contains partly tough, partly pap-like, discolored, ichorous, coagulate fragments - as exemplified in diphtheritis, sloughing tonsils, puerperal putrescence of the womb, septic dysentery, etc. The seat of such processes is above all in the mucous membranes, especially of the alimentary tube, of the urinary bladder, of the female sexual organs and their follicles; in open wounds and sores, in areolar tissue, in common integument. Amongst them may be reckoned thrush [diphtheritis]; certain exudation-processes upon the mucous membrane of the intestinal canal, especially of the colon [as a form of dysentery], and of the uterus after delivery; corrosive fibrin-exudates upon the mucous membrane of the urinary bladder; upon external and internal sores; muco-membranous ulcers, especially upon the base of the typhous ulcers; white gangrene of the common integuments [hospital gangrene].

The aphthous crasis is often idiopathic. It is, however, no less frequently consecutive upon other anomalous erases, and upon the typhous, the typhoid, the exanthematous in particular. The blood, reduced in quantity, presents the characters proper to those crases; the few coa-gula themselves, the characters of excessively croupous fibrin.

The dead body is collapsed, devoid of rigor. The death-patches become speedily discolored to russet and green. Muscles, flabby, pale. Parenchymata, collapsed, friable. The blood, wasted, dusky-red, fluid, with a few villous, broken coagula, marked by opacity, toughness, discoloration, and septic disintegration.