CHAPTER XIX 



THE BIGGEST AND BUSIEST FACTORY IN ALL THE BODY 



This chapter begins at 2 p.m. ; it is now six hours since 

 our friend supped his bismuth breakfast. No sooner was 

 it swallowed than the stomach began to discharge the 

 meal in minute jets as if its essential purpose was to serve 

 as a hopper for feeding a mill placed further along the 

 alimentary tract. Food, we have seen, does undergo 

 certain preparatory changes in the stomach ; a small 

 amount "is absorbed. The chief use of the stomach, 

 however, is to store a sufficient supply of raw fuel to 

 meet the needs of the human machine for a limited 

 number of hours. In England we usually load it to serve 

 our needs for a period of four or five hours, but habit will 

 accustom it to big meals at long intervals or small meals 

 at short intervals. The stomach, like all organs of the 

 body, can be made to accommodate and regulate itself to 

 circumstances. But whether its loads are big or small, 

 seldom or often, it always seeks to keep up a slow and 

 constant discharge of its contents as if that were an 

 essential part of its duty. That indeed is the case, for 

 the mill it feeds is the biggest and busiest factory in all 

 the body, and can deal at one time with only minute 

 quantities of the raw material, or chyme, supplied to it 

 from the stomach. It is that factory we are now to 

 investigate, one stretching along a tube-like corridor for 

 a distance of 20 feet — one fitted out with all the appliances 

 needed for the conversion of the raw materials contained 

 in food into the finished products which are consumed in 

 the tissues of the body. The small bowel is the essential 

 factory of the alimentary system. 



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