116 THE PANCREATIC JUICE. 



then fed them only with milk, fatty food, or butter, killing them 

 in from four to eight hours after the meal. These experiments 

 were often repeated, and the lacteals were always most beautifully 

 injected, and the receptaculum chyli distended with milky chyle. 



Frerichs performed the following experiment on puppies and 

 cats which had fasted for a long time : he tied the small intestine 

 far below the opening of the biliary and pancreatic ducts, and 

 below the ligature he injected milk with olive oil, or an emulsion 

 of oil and albumen, or pure olive oil, and he found, after two or 

 three hours, that the lacteals were filled with white chyle. Fre- 

 richs, however, believes that he has found that the extreme com- 

 minution of the fat, and hence in some measure its resorption, 

 are promoted by the bile and pancreatic juice ; and he draws this 

 conclusion from the following experiment: in cats which had 

 long fasted, he cut through the small intestine near the middle, 

 injected olive-oil into both halves, and tied the two cut extremi- 

 ties ; in this case, he found the lacteals springing from the upper 

 part of the intestine always far more injected than those proceeding 

 from the lower portion, and he referred this to the circumstance 

 that the bile and the pancreatic juice had access to the oil in the 

 upper part of the intestine; for although pure pancreatic juice, 

 when shaken with oil out of the body, reduces the particles of oil 

 to a state of extreme minuteness, the latter soon separate again on 

 the surface. 



We have already remarked in vol. 1, p. 250, that Bernard's expe- 

 riment is by no means convincing on the one hand, because the 

 chyle contains far less fatty acids than the ordinary neutral fats, 

 and on the other hand because other animal fluids, as soon as they 

 begin to putrefy, cause a similar decomposition of the neutral fats. 

 Schmidt and Bidder* have, however, taken the trouble to prove 

 in a direct manner the fallacy of Bernard's view by numerous 

 experiments. After having fed cats with butter, they could find 

 no trace of butyric acid in the contents of the intestine, in the 

 chyle, in the blood, or in the bile. Hence, although decomposing 

 pancreatic juice when in contact with butter, at a temperature of 

 37, in the course of a few hours gives rise to the formation of 

 butyric acid, no such formation of this acid occurs in the animal 

 body. Schmidt and Bidder now tied the duodenum at its upper 

 part, between the pylorus and the mouths of the pancreatic and 

 biliary ducts, and by means of a pipette injected melted butter 



* Quoted by Lenz (who co-operated with Schmidt and Bidder) in his In- 

 augural Thesis, De adipis concoctione et absorptione. Dorp. Liv. 185Q 



