A HISTORY OF SCIENCE 



But this is not a fair mode of ascertaining the effects 

 of the gastric juice out of the body ; for the influence 

 which life may be supposed to have on the solution of 

 the food would be secured in this case. The affinities 

 connected with life would extend to substances in con- 

 tact with any part of the system: substances placed 

 under the armpits are not placed at least in the same 

 circumstances with those unconnected with a living 

 animal." But just how this writer reaches the con- 

 clusion that "the experiments of R6aumur and Spal- 

 lanzani give no evidence that the gastric juice has any 

 peculiar influence more than water or any other bland 

 fluid in digesting the food" 4 is difficult to under- 

 stand. 



The concluding touches were given to the new theory 

 of digestion by John Hunter, who, as we have seen, at 

 first opposed Spallanzani, but who finally became an 

 ardent champion of the chemical theory. Hunter now 

 carried Spallanzani's experiments further and proved 

 the action of the digestive fluids after death. For 

 many years anatomists had been puzzled by patholog- 

 ical lesion of the stomach, found post mortem, when no 

 symptoms of any disorder of the stomach had been 

 evinced during life. Hunter rightly conceived that 

 these lesions were caused by the action of the gastric 

 juice, which, while unable to act upon the living tissue, 

 continued its action chemically after death, thus di- 

 gesting the walls of the stomach in which it had been 

 formed. And, as usual with his observations, he 

 turned this discovery to practical use in accounting 

 for certain phenomena of digestion. 



The following account of the stomach being digested 



90 



