G66 
EXPERIMENTS ON THE ACTION OF 
and shewn that his own experiments confirmed the results before 
obtained, namely, that this substance, administered in the food 
or drink, produced nothing that resembled vomiting, he an¬ 
nounced that he had obtained effects as prompt as they were 
energetic, when, instead of introducing the emetic by means of 
deglutition, he had carried it directly into the fourth stomach, 
or had injected it into the veins. 
In his first experiment, ten grains of emetic tartar, dissolved 
in water, were introduced into the veins. After some minutes 
the animal appeared very much distressed; to this succeeded 
efforts to vomit, that became more and more violent, and 
were followed, at different times, by a sort of interior vomiting; 
after which, the animal was for some minutes evidently en¬ 
gaged in swallowing it again. These efforts continued more 
than an hour, and never proceeded to a complete vomiting, 
is to say, a rejection from the mouth of substances previously 
swallowed. The emetic producing in sheep the same excitement 
of the stomach which it does in other animals ; and provoking 
efforts of the same nature, yet without leading to vomiting, it was 
clear that this impossibility to vomit was to be traced to some 
particular structure, or sensibility, or want of sensibility, in the 
organs to which the stimulus had been applied. 
The author accordingly occupied himself in endeavouring to 
discover, by means of direct experiment, on wdiich of the sto¬ 
machs the emetic acted ; and he had recourse to the same pro¬ 
ceeding that he had employed in tracing the different steps of the 
act of rumination, and which consisted in making an artificial 
passage to each of them. He observed, by means of this, that 
the three first stomachs presented only the general phenomena 
connected with rumination, and described in his former memoir; 
but it w'as not so with the fourth stomach;—in fact, he had scarce¬ 
ly made an opening into it, when the relaxed and soft rugae of its 
interior unrolled themselves, and separated, and the animal ap¬ 
peared to be in the greatest distress, similar to that which followed 
the injection of the emetic into the veins, and, like that, was accom¬ 
panied with swelling of the abdomen, and grinding of the teeth, 
and foaming at the mouth ; and, in fine, the true efforts to vomit, 
but less violent than those that were produced by the emetic. 
We have, then, a stomach, and one alone, the direct mechanical 
lesion of which will produce nearly the same symptoms as the 
injection of an emetic into the veins. But these effects, as the 
experiments of M. Bleurens will shew, are produced by the in¬ 
troduction of emetic tartar into the stomach ; while nothing like 
it can be produced by the introduction of the same substance 
into either of the three other stomachs.' Twenty grains of emetic 
