106 PHYSIOLOGY AT THE FARM. 



sent, the remarkable solvent powers of the gastric juice are 

 supposed to be owing. Pepsine belongs to the albuminoid 

 description of bodies : it is soluble in water, insoluble in 

 alcohol. By boiling, its remarkable solvent power is destroyed. 

 An artificial gastric juice is made by digesting the mucous 

 membrane of the stomach with a warm but very dilute solu- 

 tion of hydrochloric acid. Such a liquid, if the temperature 

 be kept at 100 Fahr., will dissolve, in six or eight hours, pieces 

 of hard-boiled egg and of beef. The solutions so procured do 

 not coagulate on the application of heat. 



The gastric juice, though doubtless somewhat different in 

 the several quadrupeds of the farm, yet, on the whole, pos- 

 sesses in all the striking qualities above described. This secre- 

 tion, then, is the chief agent by which, in the fourth stomach 

 of the ox, the aliment is finally changed to chyme, or to that 

 mass which the duodenum namely, the highest part of the 

 small intestine receives from the fourth stomach. 



The motions of the several stomachs in the ox during diges- 

 tion have not been very clearly ascertained. These motions 

 manifestly have two effects : the one to propel the food or the 

 chyme from cavity to cavity as, for example, the chyme when 

 formed from the fourth stomach into the duodenum ; the other 

 motion is of a different kind, being a kind of vermicular motion, 

 by which the aliment, now more, now less, changed, is made to 

 pass along the surface of the cavity, so as to be more effectually 

 subjected to the influence of the secretion poured out by that 

 surface. The motions of the fourth stomach in the ox, in 

 these two respects, do not appear to differ much from similar 

 motions in the human stomach (p. 8). 



Intestines in the Ox. As in other mammals, the intestines 

 of the ox, the great length of which has been already referred 

 to (p. 5), consist of the small and the great. The small 

 intestines come under the three heads of duodenum, jejunum, 



