THE CARDIAC GLANDS OF MAMMALS. 
BY 
R. R. BENSLEY. 
From the Hull Anatomical Laboratory, University of Chicago. 
With 16 Text FIGURES. 
When we consider the immense amount of energy that has been ex- 
pended on the investigation of the gastric glands since the discovery 
of the chief cells by Heidenhain and Rollet in 1870, it is a matter for 
some surprise that so little interest should have been aroused in the 
small zone of glands surrounding the cardiac orifice of the stomach, now 
generally known as the cardiac glands. This fact is all the more sur- 
prising when we remember that, in some mammals, these glands are 
by no means restricted to the narrow zone mentioned above, but may 
equal or even exceed in number the ordinary fundus glands composed 
of chief and parietal cells. 
In examining the literature of this branch of research, it is difficult 
to decide to whom belongs the honor of discovering the glands in ques- 
tion, because the older anatomists employed the term to designate all 
the glands of the proximal portion of the stomach including the fundus 
glands. This example is followed in some recent text-books of His- 
tology, the authors not recognizing that there are glands of more than 
two kinds in the stomach. In the interest of uniformity it seems de- 
sirable to employ the nomenclature adopted by Oppel, 96, in his compila- 
tion of the literature dealing with the stomach, and to designate the 
complex glands, composed of chief and parietal cells, fundus glands, 
reserving the expressions cardiac and pyloric glands for those which 
surround the respective orifices of the stomach. 
Cobelli, 66, seems to have clearly recognized the cardiac glands in 
man as early as 1866, when he published a description in which they 
are referred to the same category as the pyloric glands, which he had 
studied some two years before, as gastric mucous glands. | 
The next contribution of importance is the account of the structure 
of the stomachs of two kangaroos, Macropus and Dorcopsis, published by 
Schafer and Williams, 76, in 1876. These authors describe a very ex- 
tensive region of the mucous membrane in these animals as being 
formed of simple glands, containing one. kind of cell which resembles 
closely the cells of the submaxillary gland. 
