384 ELDON W. SANFORD 
cerns the reaction of the secretion which is formed. Perhaps 
the first investigators in this field were Zuerst and Basch in 1858, 
who found the secretion in the anterior stomach neutral and in 
the posterior stomach weakly acid. Bellesme said that the 
secretion found in the stomach is acid and is derived from the 
coeca. Plateau in 1874 found the secretion slightly acid, but 
believed this to be accessory to the actual digestion, which he 
compared with pancreatic digestion. He removed the coeca 
and opened them on blue litmus powder. The powder was not 
affected, so he stated that the coecal secretion is alkaline. Kru- 
kenberg found the stomach secretion alkaline, while the acid 
secretion of the coeca flows into the crop to act on food there. 
More modern authors have uniformly found that the secretion 
of the stomach and coeca is acid in reaction. 
In my investigations I first used the method of feeding a paste 
of sugar and litmus powder and dissecting the animals after 
various intervals. The contents of the coeca and anterior two- 
thirds of the stomach are always distinctly acid, while the con- 
tents of the hinder stomach may sometimes be alkaline. I have 
already given my reasons for believing that the acid secretion 
of the anterior stomach has its action not only in the stomach, 
but flows forward into the crop to aid in digestion there. This 
secretion is partly derived from the coeca and is no doubt very 
active in digesting all kinds of food, for the stomach is an im- 
portant organ in secretion, digestion, and preparation of the food 
for the uses of the body. Schroder has proved that the coecal 
secretion has a digestive action on carbohydrates. 
To make the matter of the reaction of the stomach more 
definite I removed the stomachs and coeca from ten animals, 
washed them in normal salt solution, and pressed out their 
contents. The ten stomachs and their coeca were ground with ° 
10 cc. of salt solution and left for two hours. The mixture 
was then filtered and the filtrate titrated. The 10 ce. of the 
extract titrated against 0.3 ec. of 1/20 normal NaOH, thus in- 
dicating a distinct acidity. This shows that the digestive 
processes of the stomach occur in an acid medium. 
