324 Dr. Knox on thé Structure of 
other animals, and referrible therefore in his view to this cause 
alone. 
It seems to have been forgotten, in this hurry to explain func- 
tion from structure, that it was first to be proved that a liquid 
could remain for several days in a living organ, adapted apparently 
for absorption, without being removed or absorbed, according to the 
laws of mucous membranes. This difficulty, however, was readily 
overlooked ; and yet there are only two real experiments recorded, 
in which it is pretended that any water was found after the lapse 
of a few days in the stomach of the camel. The first by Bruce, I 
fear a questionable authority : the second by Daubenton, who found 
water in the stomach of the camel ten days after the death of the 
animal: another, too rude I fear to figure as a philosophical expe- 
riment, was made in the apartments of the Royal College of Sur- 
geons of London, and is thus detailed :— 
« A camel in a dying state was purchased by the College of Sur- 
geons. The animal gradually grew weaker, and was at length 
killed, after being incited to drink three gallons of water, having 
taken none for three days previously : its death was immediate, for 
it was pithed, or instantly deprived of sensibility, by passing a po- 
niard between the skull and first vertebra of the neck: its head 
was fixed to a beam, to prevent the body falling to the ground after 
it was dead. The animal was kept suspended, that the viscera 
might remain in their natural state, and in two hours the cavities 
of the chest and abdomen were laid open.” 
It seems hardly necessary to add, that a good deal of water was 
found in the animal’s stomach, just as would have happened in any 
other animal treated in a similar way, whatever might be the struc- 
ture of the organ. Fluids often disappear from the stomach, in 
some animals, with great rapidity ; but they also occasionally re- 
main for some time nearly unaltered as to quantity and quality, and 
all this takes place in so capricious a manner, that no anatomist 
would venture to predict the actual condition of the contents of the 
stomach in any case. 
It is obvious, then, that the function of the camel’s stomach,. if 
it really be a function appertaining to it, by which the animal is en- 
abled to maintain such abstinence from drink amidst the arid wastes 
of Africa and Arabia, was not a discovery which flowed from the 
examination of structure, but that the structure being peculiar, it 
was inferred that such must be its function, for the only reason I 
can discover, that no other function could be assigned to it. 
Having got rid of these errors, and traced thes hypothesis to its 
source, we ‘shall proceed to examine that structure, frst in the ca- 
mel, secondly in the lama, proving I trust, beyond all doubt, that 
they essentially and exactly resemble each other, and that what- 
ever faculty the one posseses the other must also enjoy, if there be 
the smallest truth in the law, that similar and analogous parts must 
perform similar functions. 
