WHY THE HORSE RARELY VOMITS. 
123 
jerking pressure of two men did not make a single drop of 
water escape through the oesophagus. M. Fluorens devised 
and executed other experiments, by which he was led to the 
conclusion that Bertin had with perfect correctness referred 
the reason why the horse does not vomit, to the sphincter 
formed by the muscular fibres at the horse’s cardia, and to 
the oblique direction of that orifice. However remarkable it 
may appear, that such observers as Bertin and Fluorens 
should at the distance of a century fall into the same error on 
matters of very simple experiment, there can be no question 
that they did so with the dead horses’ stomachs referred to. 
The notes of a lengthened series of experiments published 
in my first e Inquiry,’ disprove the notion that the horse’s 
cardia is, even after death, guarded by a barrier insurmountable 
to regurgitant fluids. But assuming, for the sake of argu- 
ment, that when a dead horse’s stomach is filled with fluid, 
and closed by ligature at the duodenum, the cardia remains 
hermetically closed, however forcibly the viscus be com- 
pressed, it is matter of surprise that MM. Bertin and Fluorens 
should not have perceived the fallacy of referring the pheno- 
menon to a cardiac sphincter, and of regarding the oblique 
insertion of the oesophagus as an accessory impediment 
during life to the act of vomiting. When, in his third 
experiment, M. Fluorens found that by mechanically altering 
the direction of the cardiac orifice, he influenced the outflow 
of the stomach’s contents, he should have lost all faith in his 
arguments. Had he connected that observation with the 
fact that, as mv^cles, the stomach and oesophagus have during 
life the power of altering their relative direction, he must 
have seen that their vital endowments were an insurmount- 
able barrier to the success of his purely mechanical experi- 
ments and arguments. Assuming that water did not flow 
out of the cardia of the distended and compressed dead 
stomach, Bertin and Fluorens would have avoided the error 
of referring the phenomenon to sphincteric action, had they 
reflected on the post-mortem condition of the lips, the anus, 
the vulva, and the urinary bladder, which, tight and closed 
in life, are flaccid and open after death ; because sphincters 
are essentially instruments of life, owing their functional 
activity to the vital endowment of their constituent muscular 
fibre, powerless after death. 
The fifth doctrine confuted in my first ‘ Inquiry’ was 
Girard’s, a compound of Bertin’s and Lamorier’s. Girard 
also attached great weight to the arrangement of the mus- 
cular fibres at the horse’s cardia, and to the peculiar mode of 
insertion of the oesophagus — conditions discussed in the fore- 
