709 
SINGULAR LUSUS NATURiE JN SOME PIGS. 
Communicated by Mr. JOHN ELLIS, of Liverpool. 
I MET with a strange collection of monsters the other day. Six 
sows belonging to a gentleman whose stock I attend, all produced 
young ones blind. The greater part of them were without any 
semblance of an eye — the orbit was quite empty. Some of them 
had four ears each. Only four of the whole lot lived : they 
were either brought forth dead, or they died immediately after 
birth. One sow could not farrow any of her young ones. They 
were three times the proper size, and in a state of decomposition. 
As there was no prospect of otherwise saving the sow, I deter- 
mined on performing the Caesarean operation, which I have success- 
fully done twice on the bitch. I did not find any difficulty in the 
operation, but I had delayed it too long, and she only lived three 
hours afterwards. I wish that I had operated the day before, for 
I am persuaded that the result would then have been different. 
These pigs were all got by one boar, but the sows were of different 
breeds. 
There were no previous circumstances to account for these strange 
freaks of Nature. 
EXPERIMENTS ON DIGESTION. 
By Professors TIEDEMA.NN and Gmelin, of the University of 
Heidelberg. 
THE CAECUM. 
The remains of the food combined with the mucus of the small 
intestines, which is become more consistent, together with the dif- 
ferent constituents of the bile that have been enumerated, pass 
by little and little into the caecum, and remain a certain time in 
that reservoir, which may be almost compared to a second stomach. 
The caecum contains, 
1. A Free Acid , and in greater quantity than the ingesta of the 
lower part of the small intestines. This depends much, however, 
on the kind of food which the animal has eaten. In carnivorous 
animals this free acid in the caecum bears an evident proportion to 
the difficult digestibility of the food, and, in the horse, to the quan- 
tity of corn which he has eaten. 
VOL. xii. 4 z 
