PREDISPOSITION TO DISEASES: HOW COUNTERACTED. 47 



having numerous branches to the right and left, full of nutritious juice, making 

 its way towards the fore-part of the animal. 



This is the lacteal duct, which, from its situation between the folds, formed 

 by the mesentery, is by some termed "the mesenteric canal," and by and by, 

 (in Gibson) "the mesenteric artery." Mesocolon and mesorecfum being the 

 names of parts which usually merge in the general term "mesentery," for the 

 whole, I have made no distinction. But all this does not signify so much as thr 

 manner in which this duct gets filled at first by the lacteals. how it constantly 

 flows in health, or is obstructed by disease, and what is the mode and the efl'ect 

 of discharging its contents near the heart, as before alluded to in sect. 37, 

 second paragraph, as well as just below in sect. 51. Herein may be found 

 much matter for pli-asing reflection and study, by him who aspires after ob- 

 taining a more accurate knowledge of the curative art than is generally pos- 

 sessed ; and to attain to perfection wherein, he must study the thing itself by 

 inspection, since nothing that I can find room to set down here can give him 

 any thing like an adequate notion of its importance; nor, indeed, was it ever 

 my intention to em[)loy strict anatomical description, or to enter into learned 

 definitions, any farther than should be found necessary to illustrate what I 

 have to teach, respecting diseases in general, and some long standing errors 

 of respectable veterinary surgeons in particular. On no other point, through- 

 out my present labour, do i so much desire to be rightly understood, as on this 

 one of the absorbents, ar.<f absorption altogether;* for it is only when this 

 function takes place with regularity that health can be preserved ; when it is 

 disordered, our business is to restore it, too much or too little being equally 

 productive of a disposition to diseases, though opposite ones. An indolent or 

 an impoverished absorption requires our care no less than a too rapid or fever 

 ish performance of this function: the fleam and cathartic medicines reduce the 

 latter kind of symptoms; a generous mash, tonic alteratives, and good groom- 

 ing, are the best restoratives of a languid system. Pulsation is the test of either 

 state of derangement ; and he who is the cleverest at discovering, by this prog- 

 nostic, what is going on in the system, will always make the most humane, as 

 Well as the most successful, horse-doctor. 



51. Towards its termination, the colon makes a short turn, as if to pre- 

 vent the too easy escape of the dung into the rectum, or straight-gut, with- 

 out an effort of nature to straighten the curve at that place ; as we see it per- 

 formed when the animal strains the part, while contracting the lower muscles 

 of the belly, together with the coecum, in order to produce a stool — the whole 

 transaction being most intelligibly termed ''a motion." Several such im- 

 pediments occur in the course of the intestinal canal, and some of them are so 

 abrupt, as no after-art is ever capable of reducing to a straight line: the reason 

 for which kind of contrivance is, that its contents still possess some nourish- 

 ment, which it is desirable should be extracted, anil they are thus detained 

 that nothing might be lost: to say nothing of the existing opinion, that the 

 food which has thus lain some time in the animal must imj)art a juice diflfer- 

 ing considerably in its properties from that which was but recently received 

 into the stomach. No operation in the system is more beautiful than this one 

 of drawing from the food, now properly mixed and softened, what becomes 

 the milky fluid called chyle, first, and blood immediately afterwards ; the first 

 mentioned being performed by innumerable transparent vessels, whose fine 

 mouths open every where on the inner surface of the intesiines. From thn 

 word lacta (milk), these vessels are termed lacteals^ their function benig ^b 



• Generally termeJ " the absorbent system," and until lately, vrholly unattended to in veteri- 

 nary practice : Gibson, in his lengihy particularities resjiecting the hoi-se, not having onr^ 

 mentioned the lacteals (as if they existed not), and contenting himselfwithiust locsely nainii^ 

 ' lymphatics " at page 55 of his first volume. 



