Cattle 1853 - Lewis Family Farm

THE EXTERIOR OF THE STOMACHS. 298
tain, hangs from the roof, and floats free in the stomach, and reaches
nearly down to the floor. On either side of it is a shorter leaf, and
beyond that a shorter still, until the outer leaf becomes very narrow.
Then commences another group, with a long leaf in the centre, and
others progressively shortening on each side, until the stomach is
filled with these leaves, hanging down from every part of it, floating
loosely about, and the lower edge of the longest of them reaching
into the continuation of the ossophagean canal.
The cuticular covering of these leaves is peculiarly dense and
strong, and thickly studded with little prominences ; so that -when
the leaf is examined it exhibits a file-like hardness, that would scarcely
_be thought possible ; and it is evidently capable of acting like a file,
or little grindstone. These prominences are larger and harder
toward the lower part of the leaf ; and, in the central leaves, assume
the form and office of little crotchets, or hooks, some of which have
the hardness of horn, so that nothing solid or fibrous can escape
them.
These groups of leaves vary in number in different animals, and the
number of leaves constituting each group vary too. They float
thickest, and the canal is smallest, at the entrance into this stomach,
where they are most wanted.
is left more open.
Toward the fourth stomach the course
As would be expected, from the complicated mechanism of this
stomach, it is more abundantly supplied with blood-vessels and with
nerves than the second, or even than the first, although
times larger than the third.
that is many
The aboma&um, or fourth stomach, is lined by a soft villous mem-
f.
brane, like the digestive portion of ordinary stomachs. It also
contains a great number of folds, or leaves, somewhat irregularly
placed, but running chiefly longitudinally. They are largest and most
numerous at the upper and wider part of the stomach ; and one of the
folds, in particular, is placed at the entrance into the abomasum, yielding
to the substances which pass from the third stomach into the fourth,
and leaving, as it were, a free and open way, but opposing an almost
perfect valvular obstruction to their return. This explains the reason
why vomiting is so rare in v
the ruminant ; and that when it does
occur, it must be produced by such violent spasmodic efforts as to
cause or indicate the approach of death. See g and h. p. 288. -
Toward the lower and narrower part of the stomach these folds
are less numerous and of smaller size : they are also more irregular
'
in the course which they take ;
even transversely.
some of them running obliquely and
This coat of the stomach, when the animal is in
health, is thickly covered with mucus, while, from innumerable glands,
it secretes the gastric juice, or true digestive fluid.
The pyloric or lower orifice of this stomach is guarded by a rounded
projecting thick substance, hy which the entrance into the intestine