Exposed to the action of the air, the cellular texture dries quickly, but without taking the yellowish colour of the fibrous texture; it remains white. When it is dried in considerable layers, its cells adhere together, and these layers being stretched a little to facilitate the drying, represent a true serous membrane, so that it would be impossible to distinguish it from one dried in the same way. In this state the cellular texture is pliable; it can be bent with great ease in every direction; it has not the stiffness of dried fibrous texture; when immersed again in water, it takes but imperfectly its former appearance; its cells are separated with difficulty.
Exposed to putrefaction with other animal substances, it yields to it less readily than many of them, for example, than the glandular and muscular organs; filled with the putrefactive juices it does not become pulpy until some time after these parts. This fact is particularly remarkable in the sub-mucous texture, in that which surrounds the vessels; the filaments that compose it, resist much longer than the other parts of the cellular system, the putrefactive process.
The same may be said of maceration as of the preceding phenomena. In looking at a tendon and a portion of cellular texture, who would say that the action of water would soften the first quicker than the second? the one being soft and almost fluid, and the other compact. After remaining in water three months, of the temperature of a cellar, the cellular texture of the arteries did not appear to me to have undergone any alteration. The sub-cutaneous, the sub-serous, the intermuscular textures, &c. are changed sooner, but not so soon as that of some other organs. I have kept for six months, in a glass vessel, some nerves, which as we shall see, are not altered in water; the texture which separated the fibres of these, was as firm and distinct as at first. This resistance to the action of water is less, when the cellular texture is macerated with organs that soon yield and become pulpy, than when it is exposed alone. This resistance is the more remarkable, as this texture, being very fine, is accessible at many points to the contact of the fluid. If the texture of tendons, of cartilages, of aponeuroses, of the skin, &c. was arranged in layers as fine and as much separated, I am satisfied that three or four days of maceration would be sufficient to reduce them to a mere pulp.
As much may be said of ebullition; a few minutes would be sufficient to dissipate and melt into gelatine most of the white textures, if they were arranged in layers as fine as the cellular system; this, however, resists a long time; different layers are still seen between the fibres of the boiled muscles. The fat which remains in parcels among the fleshy fibres, after the boiling, would have been melted, if it had not been contained in cells which continue untouched; we can, moreover, be easily convinced of the existence of these layers in the parcels of fat. It is especially upon the texture exterior to the arteries, the excretories, &c. that the action of boiling water is longest in producing an effect.
The cellular texture that is boiled exhibits phenomena analogous to other organs treated in the same way. 1st. At the instant of boiling, when an albuminous froth rises upon the water that contains it, it remains soft, and about the same it was at first. 2d. When this froth is formed, it becomes hard, is crisped and contracted in size. The hardening increases until it boils, which takes place almost immediately. In this state the texture is firmer; it has become elastic; if drawn in an opposite direction, it suddenly returns, which it would not do before. 3d. Ebullition being continued, it gradually softens and loses the hardness it had acquired; then it can hardly be extended at all; it may be much elongated without breaking, in a natural state, the rupture of it is now the effect of the least effort. 4th. In fine, by the continued action of boiling water, it gradually melts. I have remarked, that it does not in any period of ebullition, assume the yellowish tinge, which is spread over the whole of the fibrous system when boiled.
From the phenomena that cellular texture offers when exposed to the action of dry and moist air, of cold and boiling water, &c. I presume that it is less easily changed by the gastric juices than many others, the muscular texture, for example; besides, the following facts prove this. 1st. The taste, almost always a certain index which nature has given us to judge of digestible aliments, is much less gratified with the cellular texture that is mixed with cooked meat, than with the meat itself. 2d. I have made this experiment upon myself; when my stomach contained a sufficient quantity of food, I excited vomiting nearly an hour after eating; when it contained but little, I could not vomit without taking a large quantity of warm water; I then threw up this and with it the aliments the stomach contained. I have frequently ascertained by these means, especially by the last, that the cellular lumps which are found with the fleshy fibres of boiled meat, are much longer in being altered than the fibres themselves; these last have become pulpy before the others are acted upon. The fat, which generally fills these cellular lumps, may have an influence also in this phenomenon. 3d. I have made the same observation upon dogs that I have opened at different periods of digestion to determine the difference of the bile in the cystic and hepatic ducts, a difference of which I have already given some account.
How can the cellular texture unite to the softness and delicacy that characterize it, a greater resistance to the different re-agents, than that of other textures much more firm?
We know that in those who are drowned, a great quantity of gas disengaged from different organs, from those especially that contain much blood, as the muscles, the glands, &c. fills the cellular texture, renders it emphysematous and makes the body float. This does not so often take place in the open air, where putrefaction is sudden and where there is a discolouration and disorganization of parts. The tendons, the aponeuroses, the cartilages, the bones, &c. have appeared to me in animals drowned for the purpose, not to assist in the production of this gas. The cellular texture itself has less part in it, I think, than the organs before pointed out. It would be easy to know the kind of gas that each organized system furnishes, by macerating these systems separately in closed vessels, so arranged that their aeriform products might be collected. If each has a peculiar mode of putrefaction and gangrene, &c. if in this state their appearance is different, it is presumable that the products that escape from them are also different.
In dead bodies that are buried, and beyond the reach of the air, the emphysematous swelling often takes place, and it is sometimes so powerful, as I have observed in a church-yard, that it will raise the lid of the coffin, though it may be covered with half a foot of earth, which raises it then above the level of the earth that covers the other coffins.