the formation of the chyle, or the act whereby the food is changed into chyle.

Chylification commences by comminuting the aliment in the mouth, mixing it with saliva, and chewing it with the teeth; by these means the food is reduced into a kind of pulp, which, being received into the stomach, mixes with the juices thereof; and thus diluted, begins to ferment or putrefy, and, assuming a very different form from what it had before, grows either acid or rancid. Here it meets with a juice separated from the blood by the glands of that part, whose excretory ducts open into the cavity of the stomach: Stomach: by the commixture of these liquors, whether of saliva or the juice of the stomach, a proper menstruum is composed, by which the parts of the aliment are still more and more divided by its infusing into their pores, and acquire still a greater likeness to the animal fluids. The stomach, by means of its muscular fibres, contracting itself, does gradually discharge its contents by the pylorus into the duodenum; in which gut, after a small semicircular descent, it meets with the pancreatic juice and bile; both which joining it, renders some part of the aliment more fluid, by still disuniting the groser part from the more pure, and here the chylification is made perfect. The bile which abounds with lixivial salts, and apt to entangle with the groser parts of the concocted aliment, stimulates the guts, and cleanses their cavities of the mucous matter separated from the blood by the glands of the guts, and lodged in their cavities; which not only moistens the inside of the guts, but defends the mouth of the lacteal vessels from being injured by alien bodies which often pass that way.

The contents of the intestines move still on, by means of the peristaltic motion of the guts; whilst those thinner parts, fitted to the pores of the lacteal vessels, are absorbed by them: the thicker move still more slowly on, and by the many laps they continually meet with by the connivant valves, all the chyle or thin parts are at length entirely absorbed; the remains being merely excrementitious, are only fit to be protruded by stool.

In the passage through the small intestines, the finer part of the mafs, which we call the chyle (as has been already observed) enters the orifices of the lacteal vessels of the first kind, wherewith the whole mefentery is intermixed, which either alone, or together with the meferaie veins, discharge themselves into the glands, at the basis of the mefentery.

Then the chyle is taken up by the lacteals of the second kind, and is conveyed into glands between the two tendons of the diaphragm, called Pecquet's reservoir; whence it is carried to the heart by the thoracic duct, and the subclavian vein: and here it first mixes with the blood, and in time becomes assimilated thereto.