If we were to imagine many gross of small India-rubber vials all placed side by side, and bound together with hay or straw into a great mat, and the mat rolled up into a sac, with all the mouths of the vials turned inward, we should have a large and coarse, but tolerably fair image of the glandular coat of the stomach. Each vial would then represent one of the glands of this coat, one of the gastric or peptic glands, as they are called. Each gland, however, is not always a simple tube, but is often branched at the bottom end, and all of them are lined, except just at their mouths, with large rounded bodies, which not unfrequently almost choke up their cavity. FIG. 72. [Illustration: BRANCHED GASTRIC GLAND a. _The peptic cells._ b. _The inert cells._] The rounded masses, or cells, as they are called, in the interior of each gland, form the really active part of the apparatus. Each cell is a little laboratory, which concocts out of the material brought to it or near it by the blood a certain potent, biting fluid, and is hence called a peptic or digestive cell. Each cell is born at the bottom of the tube, and in process of time travels upward toward the mouth. When it reaches the mouth, it bursts, and pours into the stomach the fluid it has elaborated, or perhaps may give it out without bursting, while it is still within its tube. In those cases in which it has been possible to look in upon the stomach while at work (as in the famous case of Alexis St. Martin), and where the orifices of the tiny glands (for though we have compared them to bottles, they are exceedingly small) appear like little dots, tears were seen to start at the mouths of the glands, gather into drops, and finally trickle down into the lowest part of the stomach. The stomach, as it were, weeps, and indeed the weeping of tears is just such another effect of glandular activity--only ordinary tears form a mild and, chemically speaking, impotent fluid; while the fluid which the tears of the stomach weep--the _gastric juice_--is a sharp, piercing water of excessive chemical power.--Hinton.