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The powers of the stomach would seem to consist in decomposing the Ingesta, and reducing them into simpler forms, rather than in complicating them, by favouring new combinations.

But every rational physician must feel in its full force, the absurdity of expecting to account for the phænomena of life upon principles deduced from the analogies of inert matter, and we therefore find that the most intelligent physiologists of modern times have been anxious to discourage the attempt, and to deprecate its folly. Sir Gilbert Blane, in his luminous work on Medical Logic, when speaking of the different theories of digestion, tells us that Dr. William Hunter, whose peculiar sagacity and precision of mind detected at a glance the hollowness of such delusive hypotheses, and saw the danger which theorists run in trusting themselves on such slippery ground, expressed himself in his public lectures, with that solidity of judgment combined with facetiousness of expression, which rendered him unparalleled as a public teacher. “Gentlemen,” said he, “Physiologists will have it that the stomach is a mill—others, that it is a fermenting-vat—others again, that it is a stew-pan,—but in my view of the matter, it is neither a mill, a fermenting-vat, nor a stew-pan—but a Stomach, Gentlemen, a Stomach.”