Page:Early Reminiscences.djvu/385

 321 Council, and suffer all sorts of restrictions, and have imposed on him any number of wanton obligations. I remember hearing, when I was a boy, of a living skeleton, whether it were Claude Ambrose Seurat, born in 1797, and who was exhibited in London in 1825, or some one else, I cannot recall. I was informed that he had a perforation in the membrane of his stomach, but whether a natural defect, or one made by French surgeons in the pursuit of knowledge, so as to be able to observe the process of digestion, I am unable to say. My father often animadverted on the results attained by the study of man's interior by the medical profession peering through the natural or artificial window into the abdominal sack, and of the pleasant observations made by the employment of small reflectors casting a ray of sunlight into a cavernous recess into which light had hitherto never penetrated. It was noted, said my father, that in the process of the conversion of the crude food that entered the stomach, into chyle, a creamy fluid, some substances were more amenable to digestion than were others. The chyle was at once directed to nourish the lungs, the liver, the heart, the kidneys, to build up the bones, and to mould the muscles. It was instructive and edifying at meal times to be informed that tripe was most easily digested, as were oysters, so long as they were not taken along with spirits, when they developed teetotal proclivities, and sulked into a leathery condition, resisting the action of the gastric fluid. Cabbage was slow in yielding to maceration ; and the mid-rib of a leaf most oppugnant to assault. It leaped about in the receptacle of the stomach, like a pancake on Shrove Tuesday over the fire, or an acrobat on the tight-rope. Stomach No. 1. This organ, the stomach, we possess along with every animal, the beast of the field, the fowl of the air and the fish in the waters, down to the slug, the earthworm and the flea. And the function of this stomach is to build up the physical frame, and the dinner-bell that calls us to a meal is Appetite. It has occurred to me, ever since I heard my father dilate upon the functions of that paunch we have below the ribs, that this is by no means the sole digestive organ with which we are provided. That sack we entertain below the ribs is capable of inflation or compression, at pleasure. But I considered that we were