698 COMPARATIVE VIEWS OF THE STOMACH AND 
horse the relation was as 1 to 10 ; and this last I believe to be the 
most usual. 
We shall shew hereafter that the horse, of all animals, has the 
smallest stomach, relatively to his size and to the volume of his 
intestine; a particularity whence we may derive some important 
physiological deductions. 
The ass has a stomach of larger size in proportion than the horse. 
In a donkey of middle size it contains 15 litres, as much as it does 
in many horses of small stature; which may explain why the ass 
is able to live upon a grosser diet, one-fifth nutritive, in large 
volume. 
The stomach of the ruminant is not remarkable alone on ac¬ 
count of the multiplicity of its compartments, for that we find in 
different mammalia, such as the dolphin, the deer, the porcupine, 
the kangaroo, &c.; it is likewise, and especially so, on account of 
the admirable disposition of its divisions, of which the first three 
are, as was said before, but dilatations of the esophagus, while the 
fourth is the veritable organ of secretion of the gastric juice, and 
of chylous transformation. 
Of these four divisions or compartments, the first, or rumen, 
much exceeds in volume the others all put together. It communi¬ 
cates with the reticulum by a circular opening, placed close to the 
insertion of the esophagus, and is encircled by an annular fold 
larger on the right than on the left side, which duplicature is 
formed out of the coalition of the coats of the rumen with those of 
the reticulum, the whole constituting the valve described by some 
anatomists. 
The reticulum, situated in advance of the right sac of the rumen, 
which it prolongs, is smaller than the omassum in the ox, but 
larger in the goat and sheep. Superiorly it presents, at a point 
corresponding to its small curvature, the commencement of the 
esophagean canal; and posteriorly, the opening which leads into 
the omassum. This aperture, very near that of the rumen, is at least 
eight times smaller than this last. Its narrowness well explains 
the reason why aliments, which first fall into the rumen and reti¬ 
culum, cannot pass into the omassum without being softened and 
very much divided first. 
The omassum, the veritable manifolds, into which pass matters 
yet too hard to be chymified, possesses a very complex interior 
through the mode in which its lamellce are arranged, in accordance 
with the esophagean canal. These lamellse, of unequal dimensions, 
all take their departure from the sides of the canal, which they 
multiply a great many times, in order, in their return, to re-consti- 
tute at the entrance of the omassum into the abomassum an aper¬ 
ture at least twice as large as that of the reticulum into the former. 
The abomassum, on the contrary, is bound by a mucous membrane 
