With respect to the appearances, which such erosions assume, some difference of opinion has also unfortunately existed. _Mr. Hunter_ has asserted that “there are very few dead bodies, in which the stomach is not, _at its great end_, in some degree digested; and the anatomist,” says he, “who is acquainted with dissections can easily trace the gradations from the smallest to the greatest. To be sensible of this effect, nothing more is necessary than to compare the inner surface of the great end of the stomach, with any other part of the inner surface; what is sound will appear soft, spongy, and granulated, and without distinct blood-vessels, opaque, and thick, while the other will appear smooth, thin, and more transparent, and the vessels will be seen ramifying in its surface; and upon squeezing the blood which they contain, from the larger to the smaller branches, it will be found to pass out at the digested ends of the vessels, and appear like drops on the inner surface.” This condition, however, of the vessels does not invariably accompany such solution. In three of the subjects dissected by _Mr. Burns_, there was no appearance of vessels ramifying on the coats of the stomach. To account for the absence of this vascular appearance several explanations have been attempted; “but we are not,” says _Mr. Burns_, “to regard the cause of this deviation from _Mr. Hunter’s_ description, as depending upon the particular part of the stomach acted on in the different cases; neither are we to imagine that the stage of the process at which we examine the body will assist us in this investigation; we are rather to obtain an explanation of this fact, from contemplating the difference of condition of the different individuals at the time of death; the subjects, whose cases are detailed by _Mr. Hunter_, were persons cut off by violence, in the plenitude of health, their stomachs at the time excited by the stimulus of food to vigorous action, and the process of digestion at the instant of death going on briskly, circumstances under which it is reasonable to infer that all the blood-vessels would be filled with blood, which it is evident, from the nature of the causes depriving them of life, would be detained in the veins. This being the state of his subjects at the moment of death, we shall not wonder that, when he afterwards opened the bodies, he could squeeze the blood from the digested ends of the vessels.” This is certainly an ingenious explanation, and receives considerable support from the important fact of the stomach presenting a very high degree of vascularity, in cases of sudden death, as exemplified by _Dr. Yelloly_[190] in his account of the appearances found in the stomachs of several executed criminals soon after they had undergone the sentence of the law. So also has dissection disclosed the same phenomena, in those cases where life has been suddenly extinguished by a blow on the region of the stomach; inflammation, in such instances,