WHY THE HORSE RARELY VOMITS. 127 
mouth ; but that no such evacuation occurred, though the 
necessary muscular efforts were excited, by injecting the 
same substance into the venous system of animals such as 
the horse and rabbit, commonly regarded as unsusceptible 
of emesis. 
Without giving any weight to the great practical fact that 
veterinary therapeutics as specially applied to the horse, 
altogether exclude emetics, because inoperative ; without 
taking into consideration the futile experimental attempts to 
excite efforts to vomit by injecting into the veins, the emetic, 
par excellence , tartarized antimony ; without reflecting on the 
extraordinary means to which they had to resort to excite 
efforts to vomit in horses subjected to experiment ; Ercolani 
and Yella concluded that the horsed nervous system is 
susceptible of emesis, and that in the domain of mechanical 
impediment was to be sought the reason why the act of 
vomiting is in that animal so rare, a conclusion which, with 
the greatest deference for my learned friends, I cannot but 
characterise as exclusive, inasmuch as it is a statement of a 
general proposition on the basis of an extraordinary fact, 
manifested under peculiar circumstances, and opposed to the 
results of larger experience obtained in conditions much 
more natural, and more closely according with comparative 
physiological and therapeutic observation. 
In quest of the mechanical impediment , the physiologists of 
Turin more especially addressed themselves to inquire into 
the circumstances which led so distinguished an anatomist 
as Gurlt to affirm the existence of a cardiac valve, a state- 
ment to which subsequent observers have almost unani- 
mously denied the real attributes of fact. On compressing 
a distended horse’s stomach, to which about four inches of 
oesophagus had been left attached, Ercolani and Yella 
observed that the thick and rugous mucous membrane pro- 
truded from the oesophagean orifice, wherefore they enter- 
tained suspicion that Gurlt’s valve might really originate in 
the distended stomach, in consequence of the fissure of a fold 
in the thick and loose cuticular portion of the gastric lining. 
Their suspicion acquired the strength of demonstrated truth 
after the following experiment. An aperture having been 
made in the large curvature of a horse’s stomach, a glass 
plate was fixed to the margins so as to allow an observer to 
see what occurred at the cardia when the distended stomach 
was compressed. On perceiving that the folds of the mucous 
membrane at the cardia became so numerous and close as 
completely to close the orifice, they, after a few other experi- 
mental observations of secondary import concluded that the 
