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Respiration is usually defined as the process by which air is taken into the lungs and expelled from them. It explains the changes that take place in these organs, in the conversion of chyle and venous, or worn-out blood, into arterial or nutrient blood. In order to be clearly understood, I must premise a few observations on the circulation of the blood.
Those who are receptive are conducted to their places through an infinite maze by winding paths, much as the chyle is carried through the mesentery and the lacteal vessels there to its cistern, and from this into the blood by the thoracic duct, and so to its place. 7. Those who are not receptive are parted from those within the divine man, as excrement and urine are removed from man.
Thus though the mixture of humours and the composition of minute parts may justly be presumed so be somewhat different in men from what it is in mere animals; and therefore any experiment we make upon the one concerning the effects of medicines will not always apply to the other; yet as the structure of the veins and muscles, the fabric and situation of the heart, of the lungs, the stomach, the liver and other parts, are the same or nearly the same in all animals, the very same hypothesis, which in one species explains muscular motion, the progress of the chyle, the circulation of the blood, must be applicable to every one; and according as it agrees or disagrees with the experiments we may make in any species of creatures, we may draw a proof of its truth or falshood on the whole.
That these methods are most secret was illustrated above by the activities of the soul in the body, of which man knows so little it is scarcely anything how, for instance, eye, ear, nose, tongue and skin sense things; how the stomach digests; how the mesentery elaborates the chyle and the liver the blood; how the pancreas and the spleen purify the blood, the kidneys separate it from impure humors, the heart collects and distributes it, and the lungs purify it and pass it on; how the brain refines the blood and vivifies it anew; besides innumerable other things which are all secret, and of which one can scarcely know.
The inner surface of the small intestine also secretes a liquid called intestinal juice, the precise functions of which are not known. The chyme, thus acted upon by the different digestive fluids, resembles a thick cream, and is now called chyle. The chyle is propelled along the intestine by the worm-like contractions of its muscular walls.
IV. Heat given out from glandular secretions. Blood changes colour in the lungs and in the glands and capillaries. V. Blood is absorbed by veins, as chyle by lacteal vessels, otherwise they could not join their streams. VI. Two kinds of stimulus, agreeable and disagreeable. Glandular appetency. Glands originally possessed sensation.
The subterranean watercourse, of which I hope we have talked long enough, is the small intestine, in which the chyle collects; and the tubes which run into it are, of course, the chyliferous vessels, the only channels by which anything reaches the heart which has not previously gone out from it.
Suppose these books becoming absorb'd, the permanent chyle of American general and particular character what a well-wash'd and grammatical, but bloodless and helpless, race we should turn out!
The veins are furnished with valves like the lymphatic absorbents; and the great trunks of the veins, and of the lacteals and lymphatics, join together before the ingress of their fluids into the left chamber of the heart; both which evince, that the blood in the veins, and the lymph and chyle in the lacteals and lymphatics, are carried on by a similar force; otherwise the stream, which was propelled with a less power, could not enter the vessels, which contained the stream propelled with a greater power.
If the wound heals so that the chyle is prevented from escaping, a fluctuating swelling may form beneath the scar; in course of time it gradually disappears. An attempt should be made to close the wound in the duct by means of a fine suture; failing this, the duct must be occluded by a ligature as if it were a bleeding artery.
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