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It is generally supposed that the uterus in the adult animal is not supplied with much arterial blood, merely sufficient to nourish that viscus.

But if the divine Galen will here allow, as in other places he does, "that all the arteries of the body arise from the great artery, and that this takes its origin from the heart; that all these vessels naturally contain and carry blood; that the three semilunar valves situated at the orifice of the aorta prevent the return of the blood into the heart, and that nature never connected them with this, the most noble viscus of the body, unless for some important end"; if, I say, this father of physicians concedes all these things, and I quote his own words, I do not see how he can deny that the great artery is the very vessel to carry the blood, when it has attained its highest term for term of perfection, from the heart for distribution to all parts of the body.

According to Ashhurst, Gamgee has collected 28 cases of rupture of this viscus, including one observed by himself. In nine of these cases there was no fracture, and either no bruise of the parietes or a very slight one.

Not every muscle only, but every nerve and nerve-centre, every blood-vessel, every viscus, and nearly every bone, may be increased or decreased by its influence.

The power of this juice is confined or limited to certain substances, especially of the vegetable and animal kingdoms; and although this menstruum is capable of acting independently of the stomach, yet it is indebted to that viscus for its continuance."

The more a traveller sees, the firmer becomes his conviction that health means the good condition of this rebellious viscus, and that its derangement causes the two great pests of Africa, dysentery and fever.

At other times he felt morally sure that she shared that derangement of the bivalvular organ technically defined as "a muscular viscus which is the primary instrument of the blood's motion," whose worst pains are said to be worth more than the greatest pleasures.

But it is evident that a theory which should represent the viscera as occupied by those functions of the moral sensibilities which we place in the central viscus of the heart, must, in following out that hypothesis, figure the case of these sensibilities when utterly ruined under corresponding images. Our 'broken heart' will therefore to them become ruptured viscera, or prœcordia that have burst.

In the vessels of the liver there is no intervention of the heart; but the vena portarum, which does the office of an artery, is distended by the blood poured into it from the mesenteric veins, and is by this distention stimulated to contract itself, and propel the blood to the mouths of the numerous glands, which compose that viscus.

It holds, not only of a bone, a muscle, a nerve, an organ of sense, a mental faculty; but of every gland, every viscus, every element of the body. It is seen, not in man only, but in each animal which affords us adequate opportunity of tracing it.