A Treatise on Sheep:: The Best Means for their Improvement, General Management, and the Treatment of their Diseases. — John Shaqi
A Treatise on Sheep:: The Best Means for their Improvement, General Management, and the Treatment of their Diseases.Blacklock, Ambrose
Science
A Treatise on Sheep:: The Best Means for their Improvement, General Management, and the Treatment of their Diseases.
Blacklock, Ambrose
Sheep
(20.) _Structure of the Stomach._--The term ruminating, indicates the
power possessed by this animal, in common with many others, of
masticating its food a second time, by returning it to the mouth after
a short maceration. This they are enabled to do, from the structure of
the stomachs, or, more correctly speaking, stomach; as anatomists have
now concluded, from all animals being constructed on one common
principle, that ruminating animals are not possessed of four stomachs,
as formerly supposed, but only of one, which they view as being
divided into four compartments. In drawing precise conclusions, we are
bound only to admit the existence of two compartments, the other two
belonging properly to the gullet; and being equivalent to the cheek
pouches of monkeys, or the crop and membranous stomach of birds, may
be viewed as an apparatus designed to serve a nearly similar purpose
(that of moistening and macerating the food); while the real stomach
will cease to excite wonder, or puzzle the ignorant, on being
contrasted with that of other animals, in many of which a division
exists, and from which even the human stomach, though generally a
single sac, is not always exempt,--Dr Knox, of Edinburgh, being in
possession of one that resembles a pair of small globes joined by a
narrow tube, and which, when taken from the body of a person who was
advanced in life, bore every mark of soundness in texture, and must,
therefore, have been congenital.
(21.) _Digestion._[3]--The food descends by the gullet after being
partially crushed, into what is called the first stomach, or paunch,
in Latin, _rumen_, or _ingluvies_, in which cavity are found those
morbid concretions so much, and so superstitiously, prized in the
Eastern world, under the name of Bezoar stones; from this it passes
into the second, termed bonnet, king's hood, or honey-comb, in Latin
_reticulum_, which is much smaller than the other, and receives its
name from the inner coat being arranged into cells; here it is
moistened, made into pellets, and, while the animal is at rest,
impelled by the antiperistaltic motion of the tube to the mouth, and
after undergoing a complete mastication, is returned through the
gullet to the third stomach, or smallest compartment, which goes under
the name of _omasum_, or many-plies, from its resembling a rolled up
hedgehog, and sometimes from the longitudinal _laminæ_ of its mucous
membrane that of leaflet. The food remains but a short time in the
omasum, proceeding into the fourth division, or obomasum, which in its
structure, especially in that of the mucous, or inner membrane, is
nearly allied to the same organ in the human being, and is, by the
French, from its power of coagulating milk, called _caillette_. The
last compartment is the largest of the four, so long as the animal
continues to live on milk; but the paunch speedily surpasses it in
magnitude when grass becomes the sole provision. The milk always
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