The Distribution of Red Blood Cells in the Hemacytometer

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Abstract
The effect of crowding in the hemacytometer has been blamed for the failure of the Poisson distribution to adequately describe the dispersion of erythrocytes. The following distribution which takes into account this crowding is derived and discussed: [image] where a is the number of erythrocytes which can be accomodated in a single subdivision of the chamber, [image] is the number of such subdivisions, k i (i = 1,2,...,[image]), N = na. and r = [SIGMA]k i. This distribution implies a quadratic relationship between the variance and the mean. This implication is confirmed for a variety of experimental data. It is seen that the new distribution is closely approximated by the Poisson whenever the dilution is sufficiently great. It is suggested that greater dilutions be used in practice so that the variance can be estimated from the mean count, thus obviating the necessity of calculating the mean square estimate of the variance.

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