144 ASSIMILATION AND ITS ORGANS. 



nasterial refectory ! The sipping of aromatic nectar, the brief and 

 elegant repast of that Apicius, the tongue, are supplanted at this 

 lower board by eating and drinking in downright earnest. What a 

 profusion of covers is made and laid ! What a variety of solvents, 

 sauces, and condiments, both springing up at call from the blood, 

 and raining down from the mouth, into the natural patines of the 

 meats ! What a quenching of desires — what an end and goal of 

 the world is here ! No wonder ; for the stomach sits for four or 

 five assiduous hours at the same meal that the dainty tongue will 

 dispatch in a twentieth portion of the time. For the stomach is 

 bound to supply the extended body, while the tongue wafts only 

 faery gifts to the close and spiritual brain. 



The stomach, anatomically speaking, is a vaulted chamber con- 

 sisting of three walls or coats common to the whole tube. Its 

 inner wall is made up of little compartments placed side by side, 

 and which open into its cavity, and differ in construction in differ- 

 ent parts. These are beset by a mesh of the smallest blood-vessels. 

 The inside of the stomach forms a kind of honeycomb surface 

 crowded with little mouths, and when the organ is roused, red and 

 turgid with blood. At this time also numerous little points or 

 papillae waken up upon the membrane, and bring forth a dissolvent 

 liquid termed the gastric juice. These honeycomb structures are 

 the stomachs of the stomach ) the natural components of the organ. 



The muscular coat is the middle wall of the stomach. Its fibres 

 run circularly, spirally, vortically, in all the writhings of stomachic 

 taste. They are the moving arms of the stomach, which enable it 

 to lay hold of the food, and to work and agitate it. The principle 

 of the mouth, the jaws, and the fingers, here ensouls a sheet of 

 membrane, which extemporizes shapes of every required variety. 

 Thus this seemingly simple organ erects itself into a thousand dif- 

 ferent apartments, in each of which a peculiar digestion, and a pe- 

 culiar assimilation, is proceeding. This encameration, insured by 

 motion in the human stomach, is the fixed condition of the part in 

 some animals, as the camel, the ox, &c, in which one of the sto- 

 machs is formed of deep pouches, lodging the food. The body- 

 kitchen of man and carnivorous animals is levelled away when the 

 stomach's meal is done : while the kitchen of creatures which chew 



