APPENDIX. 107 



had now seen the lacteals, have taken up his time with trying 

 whether the red veins did the office of absorption for them, as 

 he seems to have done by blowing into these veins. Nay, 

 I will go farther, and will take upon me to say that it is pro- 

 bable he was in these last dissections convinced he had been 

 mistaken in what he took the year before for lacteals and 

 lymphatics. This I think evident, both from the notes above 

 mentioned, and from his manner of treating the subject since 

 that time. For if he thought he had seen those vessels, he 

 would doubtless have used this discovery as an argument 

 against absorption by the common veins, as he has since used 

 that in the turtle. But it appears, from the notes of his 

 pupils, 1 and even from his own account of those arguments, 2 

 that he has not done so. And again, had he thought he had 

 discovered those vessels, he would not have acknowledged in 

 his lectures since that time, that they were not yet known to 

 exist. 3 He has therefore aggravated the impropriety of his 

 conduct in claiming these discoveries, by the disingenuity of 

 sending such notes as proofs of his claim. 



And lastly, as to the lacteals in birds, he tells us, " that in 

 1758, he remarked a vessel making an arch on the mesentery 

 of a cock, which at first he believed to be a trunk receiving the 

 lacteals, but not being able to inject it on trial, he conjectured 

 to be rather a nerve." And afterwards, in April 1759, " he 

 observed in a cock what looked like lacteal vessels collapsed, of 

 a blueish colour, which seemed to terminate at the back-bone, 

 &c. These he showed to the students." And, again, after 

 relating the manner of making his experiments upon no less 

 than twelve cocks/ he tells us, " that in 1761 he observed, in 

 the interstices of the great arches of the red mesenteric vessels 

 a pellucid network, some part of which seems to be composed 



way to the heart, must distend the glands, and make even the smallest of them 

 visible. The vessels seen by the Doctor seem to have been very large ; can it be 

 supposed then, if he had been convinced they were lacteals, that he would not have 

 injected them, and thus have determined whether they were glands or not, by one 

 experiment, instead of tediously dissecting sixteen fish ? 



1 See his pupils' notes above, p. 102, &c. 



a See State of Facts, p. 16. 



3 See the notes of his pupils above, p. 102. 



4 The experiments were made by feeding these birds with oatmeal and madder, 

 oatmeal and rhubarb, &c. See State of Facts, p. 12. 



