United States or Palestine ? Vote for the TOP Country of the Week !
I had traced his lungs, for example, from a swimming bladder, step by step, with scalpel and probe, through a dozen types or more, I had seen the ancestral caecum shrink to that disease nest, the appendix of to-day, I had watched the gill slit patched slowly to the purposes of the ear and the reptile jaw suspension utilised to eke out the needs of a sense organ taken from its native and natural water.
At the termination of the ileum the 'caecum' makes its appearance, with a kind of valvular opening into it, of such a nature that everything that passes along it having reached the blind or closed end, must return in order to escape; or rather the office of the caecum is to permit certain alimentary matters and all fluids to pass from the ileum, but to oppose their return.
The drinking of a large quantity of water immediately after feeding grain flushes at least a part of the undigested grain from the stomach through the small intestine and into the caecum. New grains, such as new oats, are hurried along the small intestine and reach the large intestine practically undigested. The two latter conditions are common causes of flatulent or wind colic.
In man, and most of the apes, only the first portion of the caecum is wide; the blind end-part of it is very narrow, and seems later to be merely a useless appendage of the former. This "vermiform appendage" is very interesting as a rudimentary organ.
In the alimentary apparatus there are the thymus-gland and the thyroid gland, the seat of goitre and the relic of a ciliated groove that the Tunicates and Acrania still have in the gill-pannier; there is also the vermiform appendix to the caecum.
In deer and bovine animals the incisors and frequently the canines have disappeared from the upper jaw, and the molars are unlike the premolars in having two lobes instead of one. The stomach is always more or less complex; at its extreme reaching the ruminant type with four compartments, in association with which is a caecum reduced in size and simple in form.
Word Of The Day