OF THE ABSORBENT VESSELS. 137 



alkaline ; and separates, like the blood, into a solid and a serous 

 portion : the former is insoluble, and rises to the surface sometimes 

 covered with an oleaginous layer. It contains the same salts as 

 milk, and is affected by re-agents in the same manner." If formed 

 from vegetable food only, it is nearly transparent, may be kept 

 weeks or even months without putrefying, and affords a faintly pink 

 coagulum. If from animal food, it is white and opaque, begins 

 to putrefy in a few days, affords an opaque coagulum which 

 acquires a more marked pink hue by the influence of the atmo- 

 sphere, and throws upon its surface a white creamy substance. 

 The former gives three times as much carbon as the latter ; but 

 the latter, being so much richer gives much more carbonate of 

 ammonia and heavy fixed oil, when subjected to the destructive 

 distillation/ 



Chyle collected from lacteals is whiter, coagulates less per- 

 fectly, or not at all, and does not acquire a red colour by ex- 

 posure to the airy, so that sanguification proceeds gradually 

 as the chyle passes towards the left subclavian vein. 



Although some albumen is discovered actually in the duo- 

 denum, and, as Dr. Prout allows, even in the stomach if animal 

 food has been taken, and some fibrin in the first lacteals, the 

 contents of the absorbents are found to possess more and more 

 of these substances in proportion to their progress towards 

 the left subclavian vein. The chyle contains a certain fatty 

 matter, which is considered as incipient albumen, and, in pro- 

 portion as this decreases, does the quantity of fibrin and albumen 

 increase. 



The pink colour, acquired by the coagulum of chyle when 

 exposed to the atmosphere, shows the use of the lungs in san- 

 guification. 



White globules exist in the chyle even at a very early period 

 of its formation, and these most probably it is that become co- 



u Raspail, 1. c. p. 356. 



x Dr. Marcet, Med. Chir. Trans, vol. vi. His observations were of course 

 made upon the fluid obtained from brutes. Yet MM. Macaire and Marcet, of 

 Geneva, say that the chyle as well as the blood of herbivorous and carnivorous ani- 

 mals is identical in its ultimate analysis ; that whatever food an animal habitually 

 eats, the quantity of nitrogen is essentially the same in both the chyle and blood. 

 There is less nitrogen, they say, in chyle than in blood. Mem. de la Soc. de 

 Phys. et a" Hist. Nat. de Geneve, t. v. p. 389. 



y Emmert, Annales de Chimie, t. Ixxx. 



z Dr. Prout, in Thomson's Annals of Philosophy. 1819. p. 274. 



