ON THE EFFECTS OF ACRID POISONS. 
215 
be aware, it may either be very conspicuous or all but impercep¬ 
tible. This conclusion is drawn from the examination not of 
human stomachs only, but from that of different inferior animals, 
in which similar or closely analogous appearances are observable. 
They may be seen in the stomach of the dog, but the most con¬ 
clusive evidence is perhaps to be drawn from that of the horse. 
The stomach of this animal, (as has been well stated by my 
friend Bracy Clark in one of the articles written by him for 
Rees’s Cyclopaedia ,) though single, may be compared to the more 
compound stomachs of the ruminating animals. A large por¬ 
tion, consisting of nearly the whole of the cardiac third, is 
covered with a smooth but thick cuticle, continuous with that 
which lines the oesophagus. It is bounded by a thick, well- 
defined, elevated edge. The portion which succeeds to this and 
occupies the whole or greater part of the middle third, is void of 
cuticle, and differs very much according to the state of the ani¬ 
mal at the time of death, and according to the length of time 
which may have elapsed between the death of the animal and 
the inspection of its stomach. It may be compared to the di¬ 
gesting stomach of the ruminants. The resemblance is the 
most manifest when the animal has been recently killed whilst 
the process of digestion was going forward. This part of the 
stomach is then seen to be best supplied with blood. The ele¬ 
vations in the mucous membrane to which I have been alluding 
as slightly marked in the human stomach, are here strongly 
marked and exhibit a manifest analogy with the honeycombed 
surface of the stomach of a ruminant animal, but on a small 
jscale. A considerable quantity of thick mucus is poured out 
upon this surface, and seems to be the secretion of the membrane 
itself. A special follicular apparatus, if it exists, is so indistinct 
as to escape the most careful search. When the animal, though 
recently killed, has not been digesting at the time of death, the 
elevations in this part of the mucous membrane, though more 
strongly marked than in the human subject, do not so clearly 
present the analogy before spoken of, but are very similar in 
form and character to those which are met with in man. If the 
animal have been long dead, and the stomach have become com¬ 
pletely collapsed and flaccid, the mucous membrane of the middle 
third of the stomach becomes so smooth that the irregularities 
in its surface are almost imperceptible. The injection of this 
part of the stomach in the two states last mentioned is liable to 
considerable variety, which I conceive must, like similar dif¬ 
ferences observable in the human stomach, be attributed to acci¬ 
dental causes. In some human stomachs examined at a very 
