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of its elements ; the secreting portion or breast, and the excretory 

 duct or nipple , being attached to one individual, and the receptacle 

 or mouth, cervix, glandular appendage or tonsils, and efferent duct 

 or oesophagus belonging to another, of v^hich the mother and child 

 afford an illustration. 



The stomach or digestive gland does not appear at first sight to 

 be formed upon the same type as the other glands ; it is however 

 divisible into three distinct cavities — the secreting or cardiac, the 

 receptacular or pyloric, and the efferent or duodenum. It is a tube 

 of enormous calibre, divided into three compartments of unequal 

 area. The excretory tube is recognized in the central contraction 

 of the muscles during digestion ; the cervix, lined with plicated 

 mucous membrane, has been poetically described as the pylorus. 



Comparative anatomy as well as microscopical bear testimony to 

 the correctness of this view with regard to structure and develop- 

 n;ent. 



The biliferous gland is constituted as follows : 

 The secreting element, popularly called the liver. 

 The hepatic duct is the excretory tube. 



The gall-bladder is the receptacle terminating in the duodenum 

 in conjunction with the pancreatic duct, the pancreas being the 

 glandular appendage surrounding the slender cervix of the recep- 

 tacle, and the duodenum performing the function of an efferent 

 canal to the digestive and biliferous glands. 



The glandular appendages are subject to great variety of deve- 

 lopment. The thyroid, the pancreas, and the prostate are large 

 structures, whilst in the pylorus, the sigmoid flexure of the colon 

 and the cervix uteri, the same element is little more than a fold of 

 mucous membrane with follicles interspersed. This element, like the 

 glandular apparatus, is greatly predisposed to cancerous degenera- 

 tion. 



The writer of the paper now proceeds to describe the most re- 

 markable and important gland of the human oeconomy, namely, the 

 sanguiferous. 



The jejunum and ileum constitute the secreting element of this 

 organ. The ileo-csecal valve or verminiferous appendage is the ex- 

 cretory duct in a rudimentary state. The colon, though enormously 

 developed in a longitudinal direction, must be regarded as the re- 

 ceptacle ; the sigmoid flexure folded upon itself like the letter S (as 

 in the cervix of the gall-bladder) is the cervix of the colon recep- 

 tacle ; the rectum or the efferent duct completes the system. 



The function of this system is not fully known ; the tract is lined 

 with mucous membrane and glandulse for the secretion of air and 

 other products of the blood. It can scarcely be denied that the in- 

 testinal tube, in its structure and form and arrangement of the ele- 

 ments, bears the closest analogy to the glandular apparatus as seen 

 in the other large viscera of the human body. 



The jejunum, as its name implies, is generally empty ; it is con- 

 voluted, and its parietes are covered with a net-work of capillaries ; 

 it resembles therefore in all these particulars the tubes which form 



