744 Galvanic Battery. 
determine the functions peculiar to the various parts of this 
canal, and its appendages ; and in addition to his dissections 
he made some ingenious experiments on living individuals. 
Upon injecting coloured liquids into the cavity of the peri-, 
tonzum, they were absorbed by the long and slender vessels 
which always adhere to some portion of the intestinal 
eanal ; whicl goes far towards showing that the use of these 
vessels is to secrete from the common mass of the humours, 
digestive liquors, and to throw them into the canal. An 
attentive examination of certain pouches which have been 
considered in some genera as stomachs, in others as ces 
coms, and the certainty-that the food does not enter into 
them at all, but that they are found, on the contrary, full of 
biliary humour, induced M. de Serves to think that they. 
were reservoirs of this humour. 
He thereby deprives grasshoppers and other analogous 
genera of the quality of ruminating animals, which they 
had been called; and in fact he ascertained that these in- 
sects do not retarn their food to the mouth, but that they 
merely emit under certain circumstances that biliary juice 
which they possess in great abundance. This memoir 
contains many other curious observations on the forms of 
the intestinal canal, the proportions of its parts, and their 
connection with the habitudes of insects. We shall speak 
of it more in detail next year. 
M. Dutrachet, a physician at Chateau-Renaud, has made 
a2 remarkable observation on the gestation of the viper. 
He asserts that the small vipers have their umbilical vessels 
distributed not only over the yolk of the egg, in which 
thev are originally inclosed, but that a part of these vessels 
is also distributed over the internal surface of the oviduct, 
and there forms a net which may be regarded as a real 
placenta. The vipers participate therefore in the mode of 
the nutrition of the foetus peculiar to the mammifere, and 
which has been hitherto regarded as exclusive, with respect 
to all the oviparous classes. 
XXVI. Intelligence and Miscellaneous Articles. 
GALVANIC BATTERY, 
bares CuitpreENn, Esq. has constructed a Galvanic battery 
of gigantic size. It consists of twenty pair of copper and 
zine plates, cach plate six feet long and two feet eight 
inches broad. Each pair is joimed at top by ribbons of 
lead 5 
