198 THE HOUSE I LIVE IN. 



of meat, or some other hard or unchewed 

 substance, get lodged here ; and it was only 

 with the help of the surgeon, that their lives 

 were saved. 



DIGESTION. The food, however, at length 

 arrives in the stomach. Here, after remaining 

 a short time, it gradually softens still more than 

 before, and becomes a grayish or whitish pulp, 

 called chyme. The formation of this chyme is 

 greatly hastened by a fluid called the gastric 

 juice. This does not come a long way through 

 pipes, like the saliva, but seems to ooze out of 

 the inside of the stomach, in large drops, as 

 you have seen the drops of water or sweat 

 from the forehead of a laboring man, in a hot 

 day. 



When the outside of the mass in the stomach 

 becomes soft, it is slowly conveyed, by a curi- 

 ous motion of this organ, from its left towards 

 its right end, to what I have already told you is 

 called the pylorus. By the pylorus is meant the 

 door or outer gate of the stomach, or as some 

 call it, the door keeper. It may well be called 

 a door keeper, for it really seems to exercise 



