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vided edges of the abdomen are brought together and united by sutures, 

 and the body of the animal is wrapped round with a cloak soaked in some 

 emollient decoction. At the end of six and thirty hours, the animals be- 

 came exceedingly thirsty and restless, their eyes glistening; their saliva, 

 which flowed copiously, exhaled a smell evidently urinous: on the third 

 day, the cat was seized with vomiting of a slimy substance, remarkable 

 by its having the same smell. This convulsive agitation was followed by 

 an excessive prostration of strength; it died on the fifth day; the intes- 

 tines were not inflamed, the bladder quite empty, the ureters distended 

 with urine between the ligatures and the kidneys, and as large as the ring 

 finger. The kidneys themselves, gorged with urine, were turgid, soften- 

 ed, arid as if macerated. All the organs, all the fluids, the blood itself, 

 partook of this urinous diathesis ;*putrefaction came on immediately after 

 death, and at the end of a few days, an almost complete decomposition of 

 the body had taken place. In the rabbit the symptoms were less violent 

 and rapid ; it did not die till the seventh day ; the smell of its whole body, 

 though evidently urinous, was less offensive, and the putrefaction which 

 succeeded was less rapid. 



These two experiments confirm, in the first instance, what some au- 

 thors have said of the absence of urine in the bladder, when the ureters 

 have been tied, an undeniable proof that these are the only channels 

 which convey the urine into the bladder ; they likewise concur in afford- 

 ing the most convincing proof, that the kidneys are the emunctories by 

 means of which the blood clears itself of that part of it which is ani- 

 malized in excess; finally, they prove, that the retention of this fluid is 

 the more dangerous to the animal economy, as the urine itself is more 

 animalized. 



Has nature the means of supplying the evacuation of urine by other 

 excretions ? might this highly recrementitious fluid be, without danger, 

 evacuated by other emunctories? With a view to answer this interest- 

 ing question, the kidneys have been extirpated in dogs. The removal of 

 one kidney, did not prevent the secretion from being carried on; in every 

 case in which both kidneys were removed at once, the animal died in a 

 few days, and on opening the body, there was uniformly found, a con- 

 siderable quantity of bile in the gall-bladder, in the small intestines, and 

 even in the stomach, as if the urea had endeavoured to make its escape 

 in that direction, by combining with the bile. These experiments were 

 performed at the Hopital Saint Louis, in the course of the year 1803. 



Urea, combined with a certain quantity of oxygen, appears to form an 

 acid peculiar to human urine, and which is the substance of the greater 

 numbers of urinary calculi. It resembles urea, in this, that its crystals, 

 exposed to heat, give out carbonate of ammonia 5 but it differs essentially 

 from it, by its ready concrescibility. It, in fact, crystallizes, every time 

 the urine grows cold, and forms the greatest part of the urinary sediment. 

 This acid, so weak that several chemists have considered it to be a mere 

 oxide, has been called by M. M. Fourcroy and Vanquelin, the uric acid. 

 Among its distinguishing characters, may be mentioned its being insolu- 

 ble in cold water; it is so fixed, that several thousand times its own 

 weight of boiling water is required to dissolve it, hence it may be easy to 

 account for h. s so frequently giving rise to urinary calculi : we may, in- 

 deed, wonder that this complaint is not of more frequent occurrence, 

 since a slight cooling O f the urine is sufficient to cause a precipitation 

 and crystallization of the urine. Thus, every time an extraneous sub- 



