ITS USES. 105 



Frerichs himself attaches no great value to this reproduction of 

 albumen by the bile, for he remarks that only the smaller part of 

 the ingesta dissolved by the gastric juice finds its way into the 

 intestinal canal ; by far the greater quantity passing directly from 

 the stomach into the blood, and consequently being not at all 

 exposed to the action of the bile. 



Scherer introduced a mixture of bile and of flesh which had 

 been dissolved in gastric juice into a portion of washed small 

 intestine, and after tying both its ends, suspended it for some time 

 in distilled water at a high temperature ; he then found coagulable 

 albumen in the water surrounding the intestine. As Valentin 

 suggests, it is possible that in this case a little albumen might be 

 extracted from the vessels and glandules of the gut, even though it 

 had been well wasted with water. 



Moreover the experiments made on animals in which fistulous 

 openings were established between the gall-bladder and the external 

 abdominal walls (by which means all the bile that was secreted 

 escaped externally), which have led Schwann,* Blondlot,f H. 

 Nasse,J and Bidder and Schmidt to very opposite views, do not 

 prove that the bile exerts any very great influence on the digestive 

 process. If animals can live for two or three months, or even 

 half a year, without the passage of bile into the intestinal canal, 

 the function of this fluid in digestion must at all events be a very 

 limited and probably only an indirect one, and this is the conclusion 

 we should draw from the accurate and ingeniously devised experi- 

 ments of Bidder and Schmidt ; for, as has been already mentioned, 

 the secretion of bile does not attain its maximum till the tenth 

 hour after food has been taken, and by this time by far the greatest 

 part of the ingesta has passed along the duodenum ; hence the bile 

 enters the small intestine at much too late a period to exert in it any 

 great influence on the metamorphosis of the chyme. The biliary 

 secretion unquestionably stands in a definite relation to digestion ; 

 a relation, however, which must be considered rather in the light 

 of an effect or consequence of the digestive process than as an 

 ntermediate link in the process itself. 



We are thus led back to the view to which we have often alluded, 

 according to which the most important function of the liver is the 

 formation, or at all events the rejuvenescence of the blood-corpus- 



* Muller's Arch. 1844. S. 127. 



t Essai sur les fonctions du foie et de ses annexes. Paris, 1846. 



$ Handworterbuch der Physiologic. Bd. 3, S. 837. 



In a Private Communication. 



