ACTION UPON STAKCHY AND SACCHAEINE PKINCIPLES. 351 



in full digestion and pressing out by the duct all the fluid 

 which the pancreas contained. They noted also the viscid 

 character of the secretion and its alkaline reaction. 1 All 

 who have experimented on the pancreatic juice since this 

 time have confirmed these observations. 2 



The property of converting starch into sugar is pos- 

 sessed by several of the digestive fluids. "We have seen that 

 the starchy elements of food are acted upon by the saliva, 

 that this action is not necessarily arrested as these principles, 

 mixed with the saliva, pass into the stomach, and that the 

 intestinal juice of itself is capable of effecting the transfor- 

 mation of starch into sugar to a considerable extent. It 

 therefore becomes an important question to determine pre- 

 cisely how far the pancreas is actually concerned in the di- 

 gestion of this class of principles. 



Bernard places the pancreatic juice at the head of the list 

 of the digestive fluids which act upon starch. 3 This view is 

 undoubtedly correct ; though he goes a little too far in claim- 

 ing that starch is almost exclusively digested by the pancreas. 

 Bernard's experiments, however, were made chiefly on dogs ; 

 and these animals do not naturally take starch as food. 4 In 

 man, some of the starchy principles of the food are acted 

 upon by the saliva, but undoubtedly, most of the starch 



1 BOUCHARDAT ET SANDRAS, Des FoncHons du Pancreas et de son Influence 

 dans la Digestion des Feculenls. Memoire adresse d V Academic des Sciences, le 

 14 avril, 1845, Supplement d PAnnuaire de Ttierapeutiquc, Paris, 1846, p. 148 

 et seq. 



2 Frerichs, Bidder and Schmidt, Bernard, Lehmann, and all to whom we 

 have referred in connection with the function of the pancreas, are agreed with 

 regard to its action upon starch. 



3 Op. dt., p. 128. 



4 Bernard found that in pigeons, the pancreas could be extirpated without 

 producing immediate death. In a pigeon from which the pancreas had been 

 removed by tearing the tissue away piecemeal with the forceps, when the animal 

 commenced to eat, two days after the operation, vegetable cells containing unal- 

 tered starch were found in abundance in the faeces ; while, in health, the starch 

 which these cells contained was always dissolved out (Lecons de Physiologic Ex- 

 perimentale, Paris, 1856, p. 



