DIGESTION OF ALBUMEN AND FLESH. 



93 



Length of the Stomach, Small Intestines, Colon, and Rectum. 



Length of the Bodies cmd Alimentary Canals of Ophidians. 



Digestion of Albumen and Flesh. 



The process of digestion has been the subject of numerous -careful and laborious 

 investigations, and after the researches of Spallanzani, Magendie, Tiedemann, 

 Gmelin, Prout, Beaumont, Mulder, Dumas, Liebig, Blondot, Bernard, Lehmann, 

 Bidder and Schmidt, and many others, it seems impossible that it should still 

 remain in obscurity. 



It has been the prevailing opinion of authors, that flesh, and the protein 

 bodies generally, are digested entirely in the stomach. This fact, however, has 

 lately been denied by physiologists of the highest authority. By recent experi- 

 ments, Bidder and Schmidt have convinced themselves, that one of the important 

 offices of the intestinal juice, is to dissolve and render fit for absorption, not only 

 starch, but also flesh and other protein bodies. They assert that the intestinal 

 juice not only metamorphoses starch with as great rapidity as the salivary and 

 pancreatic fluids, but also that the intestine exerts as powerful a digestive influence 

 on flesh and albumen as the stomach. Frerichs, on the other hand, has been 

 unable, in his experiments, to detect any change exerted by the intestinal juice 

 upon the protein elements of the food. Protein bodies, gelatinous substances, fat 

 and starch, remained unchanged, and he denies positively that the intestinal juice 

 has any action as a direct digestive agent. 



Professor Lehmann, in a series of experiments upon the intestinal fluid collected 

 from a loop of a gut in a human being with a fistulous opening into the small 

 intestine, found that it possessed in a high degree, the power of converting starch 



