•100 PHILOSOPHICAL TRANSACTIONS. [^ANNO IGQQ, 



them. It seems a different religion afterwards changed these places of worship 

 into burial places, 



A Discourse on Concoclion. By Clopton Havers, M.D. F.R. S. N° 254, p. 233. 



The sentiments of physicians on this subject have been various, and the hypo- 

 theses by whicli they have endeavoured to explain it, very different. Some 

 have thought the concoction of the food to be a kind of elixation ; and that 

 the grosser and more solid parts being, as it were, boiled in the fluid by the 

 heat of the stomach, and the parts adjacent to it, as the liver, spleen, and 

 omentum, are by a long and continued elixation first rendered more tender, 

 and then colliquated and dissolved into minuter particles, so as to mix more 

 equally with the fluid, and with that to make one pulp, or chylous mass. And 

 though Hippocrates does not plainly call it an elixation, yet he seems to attri- 

 bute the concoction of the food to the heat of the stomach, as its great cause. 

 Others have supposed it to be performed by attrition ; as if the stomach by those 

 repeated motions, which are the necessary effects of respiration, when it is dis- 

 tended by the aliment, did both rub and grind off some minuter particles from 

 the grosser parts, and by continually agitating the mass of food, make those 

 parts, which are not contiguous to the stomach, strike against one another, 

 and break each other in pieces, until they are all attenuated. As for bread, and 

 such things as are made of floiu", which may be softened and dissolved with any 

 common liquid, and though that agitation of the stomach, which moves them 

 in respiration, might seem capable to break and dissolve them when they are 

 sufficiently moistened with a fluid, yet this cannot be thought sufiicient to break 

 and digest flesh, fruits, or any thing that will not be dissolved in water, or 

 some such liquid. But although this motion of the aliment caused by respira- 

 tion does not actually digest it, yet it has a great and necessary use in concoc- 

 tion, and makes all the grosser parts, as they are attenuated, mix equally with 

 the fluid parts. 



• Some think that the bilious juice, and others again that the spirits are chiefly 

 concerned in this affair. Galen makes it the effect, not of one, but of several 

 causes; as the pituitous juice in the stomach, the bile, &c. 



Some will have the food to be dissolved by a menstruum, supplied from the 

 glands of the stomach, or some other way ; but these differ in their notions of 

 the nature of the menstruum ; for some suppose it to be an acid, which corrodes 

 the grosser parts of the food, and dissolves them as vinegar, spirit of vitriol, 

 or any such like acid, will dissolve even so solid a body as iron. And though 

 it cannot be denied but that oil of vitriol will dissolve flesh and reduce it to a 

 pulp ; yet it is not to be supposed that the fibres of the stomach can bear any 



