162 THE VETERINARY ART IN INDIA. 
on animal matter, which, when simply dissolved, produce pulps 
of very opposite properties ; but if they are still further decom- 
posed, their produce is very similar; for their principles are the 
same, differing only in the proportions. It is, then, by allowing 
the lacteals the property of decomposing the assimilated matter of 
food in the intestines, that we can account for the sameness which 
we find in the chyle of carnivorous and graminivorous animals. 
This could not possibly be the case by any other mode of action ; 
and from the discovery of the decompositions, and various recom- 
positions perpetually succeeding in the vegetable world, and, in 
many instances, in the animal, the above operations of the lacteals 
will appear natural ; for I conceive it is merely the infancy of the 
interesting discovery of elastic fluids which gives an air of impro- 
bability to every successive link of discovery, and fresh observa- 
tions of their extensive operations in the field of nature. 
Several more of the natural phenomena might be adduced in 
favor of this mode of operation in glands and lacteals, although 
amalogy is by no means the strongest proof that can be advanced 
in the present instance ; yet if it is known that this operation takes 
place in other parts of the animal economy, or that there can be 
no other mode of acting, it will in some measure efface the ap- 
pearance of theory or improbability — a kind of odium which every 
new observation or discovery has to combat previous to its adop- 
tion. A similar process is known to exist in the lungs, where the 
air is decomposed, and the oxygen separated from it ; at the same 
instant a quantity of hydrogen from the blood combines with part 
of the oxygen, and water is produced, which escapes in exhaling. 
Here is the whole process successively performing every time we 
respire, and, as a continued series of well directed observations 
prove a sameness and simplicity in the operations of the universal 
economy, the above property of glands is the more plausible. 
The rapid mode by which diuretics are known to act in some 
measure supports the above opinion. 
If this property is not allowed to the glands and lacteals, by 
what mode shall we account for an animal out of condition being 
turned out to graze, and returning in twelve or fifteen days with an 
accumulation of a half hundred weight of fat 1 This cannot, surely, 
be produced by the quantity of poor sour herbs which the animal 
had picked up during that time ; for the quantity of animal oil ac- 
cumulated could scarcely be produced from any known quantity of 
grass ; but if the decomposition of the watery parts of the herb is 
allowed, or of the water which the animal drinks, the phenome- 
non is developed ; for the water as well as the herbs can supply, 
when decomposed, an abundance of the principles requisite for the 
formation of fat. 
