Page:Proceedings of the Royal Society of London Vol 1.djvu/276

Rh their shape. These being objects which he had not been accustomed even to feel, he was still learning them as a child learns to read : he could distinguish the angles. and could count their number in suc- cession; but at the expiration of the third week, he could tell these forms nearly as readily as their colour.

The inferences which Mr. Home draws from these, are, that when the eye, before the cataract is removed, has only been capable of discerning light, Without any power of distinguishing colours, then objects, after its removal, appear to touch the eye, and there'is no knowledge of their outline, agreeably to the observations made by Mr. Cheselden. But when the eye has previoust been able to distinguish colours, it has then also some knowledge of distances, though not of outline, but will soon attain this also, as happened in Mr. Ware’s cases.

In a practical view, these cases conﬁrm what has been laid down by Mr. Pott and by Mr. Ware, with regard to cataracts, in being generally soft, and in recommendation of couching as the operation which is best adapted for removing them.

Mr. Home, having in a former paper communicated his observations upon the stomachs of ruminating animals, gives the present account of that organ in the whale tribe, to show that it forms a link in the gradation towards the stomach of truly carnivorous animals.

The Delphinus delphis of Linnaus, the bottle-nosed porpoise, called by Mr. Hunter the bottle-nosed whale, having been brought ashore alive by some ﬁshermen at Worthing, Mr. Home took the opportunity of examining the structure of its stomach, and discovered a resemblance between the second. third, and fourth cavities in the whale, and the different parts of the fourth cavity in the camel and bullock, which appeared to throw some light upon their uses, as well as upon digestion in general.

The (esophagus in this porpoise is very wide : it has a number of longitudinal folds, and is lined with a strong cuticle, which is continued throughout the ﬁrst stomach. This stomach lies in the direction of the oesophagus, without any contraction to mark its origin, and bears a strong resemblance in shape to a Florence ﬂask. The coats of its cavity are ﬁrm, and are surrounded by a strong muscular covering.

The oriﬁce leading to the second stomach is at right angles to the ﬁrst, and at a small distance only from the (esophagus: the canal from thence into the second stomach is three inches long, and opens into it by a projecting oriﬁce two inches and a half in diameter, at which the cuticular covering of the preceding parts terminates.