ASELLIUS 



25 



phirimos, eosqae tenuissimos candidosissimosque ceu 

 funicitlos per omne ?nesenteriwn et per intestina 

 infinitis propemodvim propaginibus dispersos : — 



"Thinking at first sight that they were nerves, 

 I did not greatly heed them. But soon I saw that 

 I was wrong, for I bethought me that the nerves, 

 which belong to the intestines, are distinct from 

 these threads, and very different from them, and 

 have a separate course. Wherefore, struck by the 

 newness of the matter, I stopped for a time silent, 

 while one way and another there came to my mind 

 the controversies that occupy anatomists, as to the 

 mesenteric veins and their use ; which controversies 

 are as full of quarrels as of words. When I had 

 pulled myself together, to make experiment, taking 

 a very sharp scalpel, I pierce one of the larger 

 threads. Scarcely had I hit it off, when I see a 

 white fluid running out, like milk or cream. At 

 which sight, when I could not hold my joy, turning 

 to those who w T ere there, first to Alexander Tadinus 

 and Senator Septalius, both of them members of 

 the most honourable College of Physicians, and, at 

 the time of this writing, officers of the public health, 

 * / have found it,' I say like Archimedes ; and there- 

 with invite them to the so pleasant sight of a thing 

 so unwonted ; they being agitated, like myself, by 

 the newness of it." 



He then describes the collapse and disappear- 

 ance of the vessels at death, and the many experi- 

 ments which he made for further study of them ; 

 and the failure, when he tried to find them in 

 animals not lately fed. He did not trace them 

 beyond the mesentery, and believed that they 



