( M ) 



before and was therefore in full digestion, to show the recurrent laryn- 

 geal nerves, and the movements of the diaphragm, he saw a network of 

 white tracts in the mesentery. He at first thought they were nerves. 

 He punctured one, there flowed out a white liquid — the chyle. In a 

 transport of joy he, like Archimedes, cried out "Eureka !" He had dis- 

 covered the lacteals. He traced them to the group of mesenteric 

 glands still known as the " pancreas AselH." He thought they went 

 to the liver, and thus failed to trace their true ending. He recognised 

 the presence of valves in these vessels and showed that they prevented 

 a backward flow. They were seen by Asellius and others, including 

 Bartholinus, both "in living animals, and men newly hanged and 

 choaked." Bartholinus in his quaint way describes how he saw the 

 " milkey veins in the body of Sueno Olai, who was choaked with a 

 piece of tongue, having before eaten and drank plentifully, because 

 respiration being hindered by the bit of tongue and his heart being 

 suffocated, there was no necessity for the liver to draw any chyle." 

 Indeed, Bartholinus believed them to pass to the Spigelian lobe of 

 the liver. 



PANCREAS ASELLI (l) AND LACTEALS (b) 

 CONVERGING TO IT. 



ASELLIS FIGURE SHOWING LACTEALS PASSING 

 TO THE LIVEH. 



FOLKESTONE and Dieppe are not so far apart — the one the birth- 

 place of Harvey, the other of JEAN PECQUET (1622), the 

 discoverer of the receptaadum chyli and its continuation as the 

 thoracic duct. Pecquet announced his discovery in his Experimenta nova 



