Some Experiments with Salts of Heavy Metals as Fixatives

Heavy metal salts mostly in 0.5M concentration were used for tissue fixation and for albumin and gelatin precipitation. Tissues from dog, cat, and rabbit were stained in acid and basic stains. It was found that the atomic weight of the cation of the salt influenced its precipitating power. Penetration was either uniform or non-uniform and the resulting shrinkage generalized or cellular. Tissue hardening or high precipitating efficacy of a given salt did not always give good tissue preservation, but well preserved tissue was necessarily firm after fixation and fixed by a salt with a high precipitating efficacy. The mordanting effects of the fixatives were arbitrarily classified into three types: isomordants, basic mordants, and acid mordants.