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Nine of these patients were sporadic but consecutive cases of clinically atypical pneumonia, of whom seven had an E.S.R. of over 90. mm. on admission and four had rates of 120 mm. or more at some stage of their illness. These levels are much higher than those commonly seen in acute pneumonia.The high sedimentation rates are not due to the excessive aggregation of red cells produced by the cold agglutiiins. The plasma protein abnormalities which occur do not appear to be unusual or specific to this form of pneumonia.Such Richard Bright (1831) gave a short account of cysts arising in relation to the surface of the brain, and there is little doubt that some of the.m were cysts of the arachnoid, as the accompanying reproduction of his original illustration shows. A long time elapsed before any further noteworthy contributions to this subject were made. de Martel and Guillaume (1930) reported seven cases of arachnoid cysts in the posterior fossa and stressed the sudden onset of headache with neck stiffness, suggesting the diagnosis of meningitis or subarachnoid haemorrhage. Mullin (1932) described two cases in which a cyst in the cerebellopontine angle produced a syndrome resembling that of an acoustic neurinoma: arachnoid cysts are commonly found associated with acoustic tumours, but in Mullin's cases the internal auditory meatus was clearly exposed and a tumour excluded. The membrane was not examined microscopically; therefore it is possible that the cysts were ependymal in origin as in a case described by Hardman and Jefferson (1938 Horrax (1924) reported some cases of Cushing's of midline cysts of the posterior fossa causing increased intracranial pressure. The cysts, however, appeared to be dilatations of the cisterna magna, and they were attributed to inflammatory adhesion of the membranes, though evidence of inflammation was lacking in most of the cases; examples of cysts in the cerebellopontine angle associated with otitis media were also encountered. Cases similar to Cushing's were described by Allen and Corkill (1937); in two of them the cysts were apparently separate from the cisterna magna and were therefore true arachnoid cysts. These authors also favoured the inflammation theory, though no histological or other evidence was given to support it.