Page:The Works of William Harvey (part 2 of 2).djvu/90

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way becomes immediately mingled with the blood, where it might receive digestion and perfection from the heat, and serve for the nutrition of all the parts ? For the heart itself can be accounted of higher importance than other parts ; can be termed the source of heat and of life, upon no other grounds than as it contains a larger quantity of blood in its cavities, where, as Aristotle says, the blood is not contained in veins as it is in other parts, but in an ample sinus and cistern, as it were. And that the thing is so in fact, I find an argu- ment in the distribution of innumerable arteries and veins to the intestines, more than to any other part of the body, in the same way as the uterus abounds with blood-vessels during the period of pregnancy. For nature never acts inconsiderately. In all the red-blooded animals, consequently, which require [abundant] nourishment, we find a copious distribution of mesenteric vessels ; but lacteal veins we discover in but a few, and even in these not constantly. Wherefore, if we are to judge of the uses of parts as we meet with them in general and in the greater number of animals, beyond all doubt those filaments of a white colour, and very like the fibres of a spider's web, are not instituted for the purpose of transport- ing nourishment, neither is the fluid they contain to be desig- nated by the name of chyle ; the mesenteric vessels are rather destined to the duty in question. Because, of that whence an animal is constituted, by that must it necessarily grow, and by that consequently be nourished; for the nutritive and augmenta- tive faculties, or nutrition and growth, are essentially the same. An animal, therefore, naturally grows in the same manner as it receives immediate nutriment from the first. Now it is a most certain fact (as I have shown elsewhere) that the embryos of all red-blooded animals are nourished by means of the um- bilical vessels from the mother, and this in virtue of the circula- tion of the blood. They are not nourished, however, immediately by the blood, as many have imagined, but after the manner of the chick in ovo, which is first nourished by the albumen, and then by the vitellus, which is finally drawn into and included within the abdomen of the chick. All the umbilical vessels, however, are inserted into the liver, or at all events pass through it, even in those animals whose umbilical vessels enter the vena porta?, as in the chick, in which the vessels proceeding

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