Chap, xii.] OF DIGESTION. 183 



Beaumont's famous Canadian, or in an animal prepared by vivi- 

 section, a juice abundant, liquid, limpid, acid, gathering into 

 droplets and flowing along the wall : it is the gastric juice. 

 This liquid attacks more or less energetically the aliments. 

 It has not much action on the vegetal substances, and limits 

 itself to dissolving the azotised substance of the cells. It is 

 especially the albuminoidal aliments which more or less rapidly 

 it dissevers and dissolves. It commences by saturating the 

 animal tissues, which swell. The muscular fibres become more 

 friable, grow softer, and their striae disappear. The cellular 

 tissue dissolves, and then the muscular fibrils are disaggregated, 

 and end by being converted into a brownish pap.' The tendons, 

 the aponeurosic membranes, are changed into a gelatiniform^ap. 

 The nervous glandular elements are also dissevered and softened. 

 The bones themselves are attacked and pulverised ; their organic 

 mechanism is extracted and dissolved, and by degrees the 

 terreous parts are likewise attacked and pulverised. A piec^ 

 of beef-bone which an eagle was forced to swallow every day, 

 and which he regularly vomited, disappeared in twenty- five days. 

 The portion of the aliments merely softened' swells, is saturated 

 by the gastric juice holding in solution the substances already 

 transformed into peptones, and the whole forms a species of soft 

 mass called chyme, which gradually, in portions, after flowing 

 for some time in the stomach itself, from the cardia or cesophagian 

 orifice to the pylorus or intestinal orifice, ends by passing into 

 the intestine. » 



The agent of this transformation, the gastric jidce, owes its 

 digestive properties principally to two substances, an acid and a 

 ferment. It would be more correct to say, to acids — the lactic 

 acid, and the cWorohydrio acid'; but the first, the lactic acid, 

 comes in part from the evolvement of the starch, or rather from 

 the sugar which proceeds from it, under the influence of the 

 salivary ptyaline. The other acid" is secreted by the glandiiles.- 

 Among animals with multUocular stomach, one of the parts 

 ^ Schiff, Digestion, loe. eit., p. liS. 



