AN ANATOMICAL STUDY ON THE 



be apparent, especially in warm-blooded animals 

 where it happens rapidly. This is like a piece of 

 machinery in which one wheel moves another, 

 though all seem to move simultaneously, or like 

 the mechanism in fire-arms, where touching the 

 trigger brings down the flint, lights a spark, which 

 falls in the powder and explodes it, firing the ball, 

 which reaches the mark. All these events because 

 of their quickness seem to occur simultaneously 

 in the twinking of an eye. Likewise in swallowing: 

 lifting the tongue and pressing the mouth forces the 

 food to the throat, the larynx and the epiglottis 

 are closed by their own muscles, the gullet rises and 

 opens its mouth like a sac, and receiving the bolus 

 forces it down by its transverse and longitudinal 

 muscles. All these diverse movements, carried out 

 by difi^erent organs, are done so smoothly and 

 regularly that they seem to be a single movement 

 and action, which we call swallowing. 



So it happens in the movement and action of the 

 heart, which is sort of a deglutition or transference 

 of blood from the veins to the arteries. If anyone 

 with these points in mind will carefully watch the 

 cardiac action in a living animal, he will see, not only 

 what I have said, that the heart contracts in a con- 

 tinuous movement with the auricles, but also a 



mates the current attitude. The classical descriptions of deglutition 

 are by F. Magendie (1783-1855), Precis element, de Physiol., l: 58, 

 1817, and by H. Kronecker (1839-1914) and S. J. Meltzer (1851-1921), 

 Arch. f. Physiol., 1880, 299 and 446. 



[48I 



